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A CHAPLAIN'S 



Campaign with Gek Butler. 



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I>E,I]SrTED F-OR THE3 ^TJTHOR. 



1865. 



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A CHAPLAIN'S 

CAMPAIGN ¥1X11 GENERAL BUTLER. 



I^Ew-ToEK, Jan. 4, 1865. 

To Major-General B. F. Butler, Commanding Dejpartment 
of Virginia and North- C ar olina : 

General : Under date of Sept. 26th, 1864, I wrote out and 
sent to you a pretty full Statement of my case, being advised 
thereto by Colonel Edward W. Serrell, speaking, as I under- 
stood him, at your instance or request. I now beg leave to 
lay before you another statement, and to invite your special 
attention to it. The main particulars of this latter statement 
were noted down by me a few days after their occurrence, so 
that I feel pretty confident I have them about right. And I 
think it may do you good to reproduce them to you, and to 
give you a fair opportunity to ruminate them at your leisure. 

For the better understanding of the matter in hand, I will 
preface it with a few items from my Statement of Sept. 26th. 

Before going to the seat of war, which was in February, 
1862, I entered into an engagement with Parke Godwin, 
Esq., of the Kew-York Evening Post, to write for that paper. 
"While in the Department of the South under Generals Hun- 
ter, JVIitchel, and Gillmore, I made that engagement known 
to them, and had occasional interviews with them, or their 
representatives, in reference to it. Soon after landing at Ber- 
muda Hundred, last May, I went to your Provost-Marshal, 
told him who I was, informed him of my engagement with 
Mr. Godwin, and asked if there were any restrictions on 



4 A chaplain's CAMPAIGN" 

newspaper correspondence, or any regulations concerning it. 
I nnderstood him to say there were none, and so thought I 
shoukl not be wrong in continuing to write for the paper. 

My articles written for publication in the Evening Post 
were signed "Loyalty," and published with that signature. 
Besides these, I often wrote private letters to Mr. Godwin, 
which were not meant to be published, and were not pub- 
lished. 

Soon after your grand defeat up on Proctor's Creek, near 
Drury's Bluff, I wrote a private letter to Mr. Godwin, givino- 
what I believed to be a fair and truthful account of that ad- 
venture. I put the matter in that form, partly because I had 
some doubt as to the propriety of setting it directly before the 
public. Most of the letter appeared in the Evening Post 'of 
May 2rith. As a private letter, it was signed with my own 
name, but was printed without any signature, the editor in- 
troducing it with a sort of voucher for its authenticity. 

On the 29th of May, General Gillmore ordered me to 
ISTew-York on special duty ; which duty, he said, was to 
superintend the printing of some official matter to be pub- 
lished by Mr. Yan N'ostrand. The General, on giving me 
the order, said he would send to the publisher for me particu- 
lar instructions in what I was to do. As I had, the night be- 
fore, learned by telegraph, that my son William was very dan- 
gerously ill, the General gave me at the same time permission 
to go to my family in Massachusetts. 

My son died the first week in June ; and his mother, 
broken down with grief and care, was sick nearly all the 
Summer; so much so, that at one time she was hardly expected 
to live. I was also very much out of health myself, from the 
effects of a bilious intermittent fever, contracted while on duty 
in South-Carolina. About the middle of June, I wrote to 
Mr. Van IS^ostrand, to know if any instructions had come for 
me from General Gillmore. He replied that none had come, 
and if any should come he would notify me at once. :N"ot 
very long after this, General Gillmore was relieved of his 
command of the Tenth Army Corps, so that I was no lono-er 
subject to his order. 

Early in July, I was in Kew-York, and there received an 



WITH GENEEAL BUTLER. 5 

order from you remanding me to my regiment. As our Colo- 
nel was then in the city, I called on liim to know where I 
should report. He replied, in effect, that he could not tell, 
the regiment being so scattered that he hardly knew where 
the headquarters were : " I do not know," said he, " but I 
am as much the headquarters as anywhere." The next day, 
I learned that my wife was a good deal worse ; and, being 
somewhat perplexed as to my duty, I ventured to return to 
my family, where I was soon after so prostrated with illness 
as to be unable to travel. Owing to these causes, I was de- 
layed from day to day, till I became discouraged, and resolved 
to offer my resignation. Accordingly I went to Kew-York, 
and on the first of September handed my resignation to Col- 
onel Serrell, who said he would forward it to you, and that 
he thought there was no need of my going on to the seat of 
war. 

On the 13th, the Colonel, being still in JSTew-York, as I also 
was, received a telegram as follows : 

" Butler's Headquakters, Sept. 13, 1864. 
" To Colonel Serrell^ 57 West Washington Place : 

" Find Chaplain Hudson, of your regiment, who has been 
ordered to report to his regiment, and has failed to obey the 
order. Take his parole in writing forthwith to appear at 
these Headquarters : if he fails to give his parole, have him 
sent here to me under guard. Your special attention is called 
to the executing of this order. 

(Signed) "B. F. Butler, 

" Major-General." 

I had been told you were a vindictive man, but was loth to 
believe it. This order looked rather threatening indeed ; 
nevertheless, I gave my parole at once, hastened forward as 
fast as I could, and " appeared" at your Headquarters on the 
19th. As for your words — " if he fails to give his parole, 
have him sent here to me under guard" — I thought them 
somewhat brutal in temper and spirit ; for you did not know 
me personally ; the fact of my being a clergyman ought not 
to have been with you any presumption against me ; that I 



6 A chaplain's campaign 

had expressed an adverse opinion of your military leadership, 
was no certain proof of a bad heart in me ; and you had no 
doubt seen my resignation, which had been approved and for- 
warded to you by my Colonel, and from which you might 
have learned that I was suffering from " continued and obsti- 
nate ill-health, such as to render me unfit for the service." 
But let that pass : " you must think, look you, that the worm 
will do his kind." 

I had schooled myself well for the meeting with you ; was 
thoroughly armed with the soft answer that turneth away 
wrath, though not able to turn away your wrath. I did not 
fear to meet you. Sir, for I supposed you to be so much like 
other men, that integrity of purpose and a fair cause would 
be some security with you. In this I was mistaken. In due 
time I was summoned to an interview with you, which proved 
to be somewhat long, and rather interesting — at least to me. 
It was very soon evident that you had called me before you, 
not for the purpose of hearing me or of learning any thing 
about me, but merely for the pleasure of browbeating and 
condemning me. During the interview I observed and studied 
you intently; of that you may be sure. And, however it 
may have been before, I Tx/iiow you noic — know you like a 
book. Indeed, my General, you disappointed me much. 
You did not appear nearly so well as I had expected ; your 
wits seemed badly out of tune, your whole inner man distem- 
pered with unbenevolent passion. You put on airs, indeed 
you did, that were both mean and silly. Some parts of your 
performance reminded me of — " Then, a soldier, full of strange 
oaths, and bearded like the pard, seeking the bubble repu- 
tation even in the cannon's mouth." But pardon me : I 
do not mean to stick upon you the latter part of this descrip- 
tion ; for I know of no cannon's mouth that you have ever 
" sought unto" for reputation or any other bubble. I have 
seen you ride, and I have heard you swear, though I never 
saw you doing both at the same time ; but, from what has 
been told me of your accomplishments in that line, I am 
moved to suggest that you take this as your motto : " Come, 
wilt thou see me ride % and when I am o' horseback I will 
swear." 



WITH GENERAL BUTLER. 7 

Was it because I was a clergyman, Sir, that you thought to 
storm me into confusion or to strike me dumb by a coarse ex- 
hibition of Butlerism? Did you hope to get'yourself honour 
on me by enacting the court-room ruffian at me ? and this too 
in a place where there was no court to protect me against 
you, or, which was of more importance, to protect you 
against yourself? where you were at once accuser, attorney, 
and judge ? You proceeded with me throughout just as 
though you were cross-examining a witness. But your repu- 
tation as a low criminal lawyer forbids me to think that you 
often work through the process so infelicitously as you did on 
that occasion. I have stood a much sharper cross-examina- 
tion. Sir ; but the lawyer who conducted it was also a gentle- 
man, and therefore I was not disgusted with it. 

You first called me to account for having been absent with- 
out leave. But I soon explained this, so that you did not 
seem to think much could be made out of it ; not much, that 
is, save as a handle for working out some other purpose. 
For, of course, you knew well enough that in the matter of 
" voluntary absence" custom and usage allow a somewhat 
wider margin to chaplains than to other officers. And rightly 
so, inasmuch as chaplains, 1)esides being on rather small pay, 
have no chance of promotion, but must end in that respect 
just as they begin ; so that ambition, the soldier's virtue, can 
have no place with them : not to mention that their office 
does not stand in so close connection with tlie efficiency of an 
army as in case of other officers. But, in truth, the circum- 
stances of my case were such as, with all fair-minded men, 
would go far to excuse any officer in doing as I did. 

And so, on my explaining the matter, you presently left 
this topic, and, with a good deal of unnecessary swaggering 
and bluster, took me up on that which, as I knew right well 
all the while, was the real " head and front of my offending." 
In my letter to Mr. Godwin, already mentioned, I had faulted 
your generalship in the military operations of last May near 
Bermuda Hundred. It was for this that you wanted to pinch 
and wring me. And when I gave you a true account of the 
matter, this, instead of appeasing your wrath, only seemed to 
kindle it the more ; perhaps because it placed the responsi- 



8 A chaplain's campaign 

"bility of the publication on those whom you could not reach. 
And here I found you thoroughly in earnest ; but I also 
found that you could not well be in earnest without playing 
the old bruiser. Your motive, my General, was revenge, too 
palpably so to admit of any question ; indeed, I think you 
hardly cared to disguise it. And your passion made you un- 
wise, or at least unshrewd ; its effect being, I should think, to 
disedge your wits and dismantle your judgment. At times 
you waxed pretty decidedly tempestuous, especially when 
General Gillmore was your theme ; repeatedly denouncing 
him as " a damned scoundrel" and " a liar ;" — language which, 
had you been perfectly cool, I doubt whether even you would 
have considered exactly "becoming an officer and a gentle- 
man." You seemed, indeed, to be labouring under some ma- 
lignant hallucination about General Gillmore, as though he 
were ghosting you, and to have got me strangely mixed up 
with him therein. At first, you insisted upon it that I had 
colluded with him, and knowingly lent myself to some naughty 
designs of his against you. And when I refuted this charge, 
you then ventilated your inward parts, in effect, and nearly in 
words, as follows : " As for the great villain in this case, he is 
beyond my reach, I cannot get at him directly ; but, sir, I 
have got you : he has been making use of you as a poor tool 
against me ; and now, sir, you must serve my turn against 
him." In proof of my having conspired with him to injure 
you, you alleged that his ordering me to ISTew-York on special 
duty was a mere pretext for getting me out of the way, and 
that I knew it to be so. I assured you that I had no know- 
leds'e of the sort : that I had received the order and acted 
iipon it in perfect good faith, honestly believing General Gill- 
more had some real and legitimate work for me to do in ISTew- 
York ; and in proof of this, I cited the fact of my having writ- 
ten to Mr. Yan JSTostrand for the instructions which he was to 
send on for me. 

At one stage of the dialogue, when you were trying to 
make me say something untrue of General Gillmore, my an- 
swer not being such as you wanted, you exclaimed, " That's a 
lie, sir ! a damned lie !" which, though polite enough as com- 
ing from you, did not strike me as in perfectly good taste. 



WITH GENERAL BUTLER. 9 

Eut I forget : your taste was formed in an atmosphere wliicli 
I probably cannot appreciate. I have indeed read the Bible 
some, read Shakespeare some, preached some ; yon have — 
jpractised. That you are a brave man, I am willing to be- 
lieve; but I doubt, yea, I doubt very much, whether yon 
would have dared to speak thus to one who was in a condition 
to resent it. Being a brave man, you ought not, my General, 
thus to use the dialect of a cowardly ruffian. Remember, I 
pray you, what it is that defileth a man. And the next time 
you feel the inspiration of valiantness upon you, don't at- 
tempt to make proof of it by assaulting one whose hands are 
tied. 

At another time, on my pleading ignorance in a matter 
where you did not want me to be ignorant, you exploded 
nearly thus : " Don't tell me that, sir ; come, sir, you are not a 
fool ;" and then you added, with, I thought, more of truth 
than politeness, " You are an ordinary man, sir, an ordinary 
man." This, I believe, was the nearest approach to wit that 
you were guilty of during the interview. And this was in- 
deed pretty fair, though not nearly so good as I had expected 
from you. I had it in my mind to reply, "And you, General, 
are a very extraordinary man ;" but it was not my part to 
bandy wit or words with you, and so I refrained. On the 
whole, it was pretty clear that you did not regard me as a 
gentleman. But were you not something at fault in suppos- 
ing this to be a good reason for not behaving like a gentleman 
yourself ? 

In the course of our interview, you made several Scripture 
allusions, but I did not think you particularly happy in them ; 
in truth, you seemed more pedantic than learnedly-wise in 
your drawings from that source. For instance, you charged 
me with malice in writing the letter to Mr. Godwin. I as- 
sured you otherwise ; that I was indeed very much distressed 
at the turn things took on the 16th of May ; but that I had 
all along, both before and after that event, been praising you 
and standing up for you ; though, to be sure, I thought you 
would be more useful, and do yourself more credit, in some 
high administrative position, than where you were. To which 
you replied nearly thus : " I understand you, sir. You are 



10 A chaplain's campaign 

doubtless fiuniliar with the Scriptures. Was it not Ahah — I 
think it Avas Ahab," (you probably meant Joab,) " who said 
to some one, ' O my brother, my brother ! ' and at the same 
time thrust his dagger into him ?" " But, General," said I, 
" how does that apply to me ?" whereupon you exclaimed : 
" You stabbed me in the dark, sir ! you stabbed me in the 
dark ! But I have caught you at last ; I have you in my power 
now, sir, and I am going to punish you." Again : I had oc- 
casion to remark that our regiment was very much split up 
and scattered. " Yes," said you ; " when the shepherd is 
away, the sheep w^ill get scattered." I replied : " But, Gen- 
eral, in this case the sheep were pretty well scattered before 
the shepherd went away." Indeed, Sir, I thought you must 
be rather hard up for matter against me, thus to allege my 
absence as the occasion of that which you couhl not but 
know to have sprung from the necessities of the service. 

You accused me of stealing from the Government, in that 
I had been taking pay without doing any duty. I told you 
that I had drawn no pay for any of the time since the date of 
your order remanding me to my regiment ; and that I Avas 
Avilling to lose it, if it were judged that I ought to lose it. 
But, as an oifset for this interval of leisure, I then told you 
that, if I had been in the way to receive pay without work- 
ing for it, I had also done a good deal of work without get- 
ting any pay for it ; that I was on duty in New- York and on 
Staten Island upward of three months before I could get 
mustered into the service, our officers in command assuring 
me, meanwhile, that I would be paid ; that, during this time, 
I did some very hard and important work, but had never re- 
ceived any pay, and had given up all hope of getting any. 
Whereupon you remarked : " That was no credit to you, sir ; 
you expected to be paid." " Of course I did," said I; "for. 
General, I am a poor man, Avitli a family to support ; so that 
I cannot aflbrd to work without wages, neither would it be 
right for me to do so." I then' told you, further, that Avhile I 
Avas thus on duty, Avord came that our men were suffering 
dreadfully for want of rubber blankets, and an earnest appeal 
Avas made to me to procure them relief. That this Avas for 
me a very hard undertaking, but I set right about it, and did 



WITH GENERAL BUTLER. 11 

not pause till it was done. That, after working with all mj 
might for many clays, I at last engaged some dealers to fur- 
nish the blankets, on my undertaking to pay for them when the 
men should be paid. That, accordingly, I gave my written 
obligation in the sum of $756.25, and thus got the men sup- 
plied ; the blankets being put to them for precisely what they 
were put to me. That, owing to some misunderstanding, it 
was a long time before the men were paid ; and wlien at 
length a payment was made, some had died, others had been 
discharged for disability, and the regiment, moreover, was so 
scattered that I could not get at them. That for two years I 
used my best diligence in collecting the money, and still was 
more than $150 out of pocket on that score. And that all 
this extra-official work was done purely out of kindness to the 
men and concern for the good of the service. I told you this 
in all honesty and simplicity, for I still supposed you to be a 
man. And I spoke of it, not in the way of complaint, but 
as a fair argument of integrity and earnestness in the cause. 
You replied to it all by comparing me to Judas ! and, as I 
did not see the aptness of the comparison, you then observed, 
that I had doubtless taken care to see myself well paid for 
bearing the bag in that business. You, my General, you were 
base enough to say that ! And I shall hold you to it. 

Once more : The current of our talk led me to assure you 
that I had had none but friendly feelings towards you, and 
had wished nothing but good to you ; and I stated certain 
facts in evidence of this : at which you turned upon me your 
most eloquent look, and went to expressing, with tongue and 
eyes, the utmost contempt for me and my feelings ; in fact, 
you could hardly find words big enough, or looks black enough, 
to convey your magnanimous scorn. I was truly shocked, Sir, 
to see that pure and beautiful face of yours all marred and 
turned awry by so distortive an effort. " Bless us," thought 
I, " what if his face should marble in that shape ! 'twould be 
enough to scare all the gods and goddesses from their pedes- 
tals." Otherwise, I found no foult with your grim mirth, and 
I still find none ; for I really did not think myself worth your 
revenge ; and my greatest wonder all along has been, that you 
did not see that I was far too insignificant to justify any such 



12 A chaplain's CAMPAIGN" 

cmi->hatic notice as yon were taking of me. Indeed, my Gen- 
eral, I must say, you have been hunting rather small game for 
a man of your size. But I doubted whether even yoiu* huge 
resentment could lift me out of my proper obscurity into any 
sort of consequence. To be sure, your violence, though un- 
heroical enough, was in some respects rather flattering to me ; 
yet I was not altogether pleased with it. 

But I was much struck with tlie disproportion, or what 
seemed such, between your scorn of me and your resentment 
of what I had done. For you spoke with exceeding bitterness 
of the outrageous abuse that had been poured upon you by the 
Press all over the country, in consequence of what I had writ- 
ten about you. So, too, on my telling you that I should have 
resigned long ago, but for the necessity of being at hand to 
collect the money for the rubber blankets, you exclaimed : 
'' Would to God you had done so, sir ! would to God you had 
never come here !" Perhaps it was my vanity that led me 
to note these passages, but note them I did. And it really 
seemed to me that if I had been, as I certainly had not, the 
guilty cause of defeating your aspirations for the Presidency, 
you could hardly have been more fluent of railing and bitter- 
ness against me. I have indeed been credibly informed since, 
that you hoped and intrigued for the nomination, first, at Bal- 
timore, and then, failing of that, at Chicago ; but I am perfect 
that you never stood the slightest chance at either place, nor 
would have done so, though I had spent all the brains and all 
the ink I ever had, in writing up your generalship. 

One passage of our conversation I am sure it will delight 
you to be reminded of. I told you, and truly, that I had 
often, on hearing you assailed, defended you, and upheld you 
to be a just and kind-hearted man. You replied that you 
meant to be just, but, as for kind-heartedness, you spurned the 
imputation ; that you were not kind-hearted, and you scorned 
to be thought so : it was too like the Yankee phrase " clever 
fellow," as applied to one rather weak in the upper storey. To 
which I answered, that I had used the word in a good sense ; 
and that I had found kindness of heart to be of some use 
among the soldiers. I noticed that, at the hearing of this, your 
countenance fell somewhat, thus slightly indicating that you 



WITH GENERAL BUTLER. 13 

wanted mncli to be popular Matli tlie soldiers, and that you 
were sensible you were not so. 

I spoke then as I thought, but I now understand you better. 
And I acquit you of being kind-hearted : whatever may be 
your deserts, you clearly deserve no such imputation as that. 
It has been said that against stupidity the gods themselves are 
powerless. And so I admit that against the notes of compas- 
sion you have the strength of an ox, the firmness of a bear. 
Certainly my experience of you failed to discover the slightest 
stirring of a humane or generous chord in your bosom : touch 
you where I might, I still found you as hard as a flint ; and as 
your hardness is that of burnt clay, and not of any wintry 
congelation, of course no warmth can damage it ; it is sun- 
proof and sky-proof: whether it is proof against all other 
forces, will be better seen when " even-handed justice com- 
mends the ingredients of your poisoned chalice to your own 
lips." If you are covetous of such honour, take it, for it is 
yours. Yet I remember. General Sherman, in rehearsing the 
noble traits of his beloved McPherson, that great young sol- 
dier — " the garland of the war " — O, too soon withered ! — 
mentions kindness of heart as among the noblest. But then 
General Sherman, like his fallen brother, the theme of his 
praise, is framed of other stuff than you ; being indeed as dif- 
ferent from you in this respect as he is in warlike achievement. 

And I shall henceforth be careful, withal, how I accuse you 
of being just ; I have tasted your vindictiveness too much to 
repeat that mistake. It is certain, moreover, that a man with- 
out kindness of heart cannot be just; for in the nature of 
things such a man is all compact of selfishness, which is not 
the complexion of justice ; and it is not in him to know the 
power or resj)ect the order of so high and sacred a thing, how- 
ever he may counterfeit the forms and language thereof. 

" "Where pity's held intrusive, or turned out, 
There wisdom will not enter, nor true power, 
jSTor aught that dignifies humanity." 

For you must know, my General, that such a man wants 
the corresponding faculty, the answering sense. So that you 
might as well discourse the harmonies of justice to a congre- 



14 A chaplain's campaign 

gation of wild asses, as to liim. Yon, Sir, a just man ! and 
fearing nothing else so much as a bodily hurt or a popular 
hiss! You a just man ! and comprehending no higher force 
in human aifairs than terror and torture ! As for your sense 
or idea of justice, one half of it, I think, must have been in 
high glee when you juggled and spirited off — whither, O! 
whither ?— that $50,000 of gold in :Nrew-Orleans. For the 
other half, why, when a Shylock or a General Butler talks of 
justice he means revenge. The smell of blood, sweeter to 
such than the perfumes of Arabia, is all the sympathy with 
justice they have. And so, in the name and behalf of this 
august power, " whose seat is the bosom of God, whose voice 
the harmony of the world,'' it may with special fitness be said 
or sung, — note it, my General,* — 

" The man that hath no music in himself, 
Nor is not mov'd with concord of sweet sounds, 
Is fit for treasons, stratagems, and spoils; 
The motions of his soul are dull as night, 
And his affections dark as Erehus : 
Let no such man be tkusted." 

Out of divers other noteworthy passages in our interview, 
I shall stay to cite but one more. Referring to my sacred 
calling, you scoffed at me as a " hypocrite," tossed off a char- 
acteristic sneer about my unfitness to be a Christian minister, 
and then went on, in what sounded very like cant, to lecture 
me somewhat on the duties of that office. I made no reply to 
this at the time. But let me assure you now, my General, 
that I am a clergyman, " in good and regular standing," of 
the Protestant Episcopal Church. You ought to have known 
this, for I had preached and ministered a good many times in 
St. Anne's Church, Lowell, where your own family used to 
attend. The worthy Rector, Dr. Edson, has known me pretty 
well for some fifteen years ; probably he has learned as much 
about me in that time as you could learn during the fifteen 
minutes we had been together when you emptied your scoffs 
upon me ; and, if you care to have any information concerning 
me, I daresay he can give it you. Meanwhile, as regards the 

* It is well known in the army that Geueral Butler has a strong aversion to music. 



WITH GENERAL BUTLER. 15 

matter in question, I demur to your sentence ; you are not the 
proper judge of me in that respect. And a man of your fin- 
ished proportions should not take upon him to know too much. 
Be content, I pray you, with your mastership in the art of 
war, and with the exercise of those unique graces which have 
made your name a proverb. A bishop's mitre can hardly sit 
well oil the laurelled brows of such a mighty conqueror as the 
hero of Big Bethel and Proctor's Creek, 

Such are a few items of what I experienced at your hand 
during our interview. You charged me to my face with lying, 
stealing, fraud, and hypocrisy ; you likened me to " Ahab," the 
traitor-murderer, and to Judas, the traitor-thief; all this, too, 
when you knew you had me in your power, so that I could 
not answer your reproaches nor repel your insults. I do not 
claim to have given the passages in the order of their occur- 
rence, but I do claim to have set them forth with substantial 
truth. And I think these specimens are a pretty fair average 
of your behaviour on that occasion. What do you think of 
them now, my General ? Do they not something smack of 
what Hamlet calls "the insolence of office?" Can you, on 
cool reflection, can you think it was altogether handsome in 
you, a Major-General in the army of the United States, thus 
to insult over a minister of the Gospel, who was in your pow- 
er, and could not help himself against you ? Have you read, 
and do you remember, the well-known saying of Burke, that 
" the hatefullest part of tyranny is its conturfielies ?" For 
myself, permit me to say, that I cannot think the performance 
was very creditable to you either as a gentleman, a general, a 
lawyer, or a theologian. It seems hardly possible that such an 
achievement should have come by imitation, so I suppose it was 
purely the result of character. Yet I am persuaded that you 
did yourself great injustice, and that you would have made a 
much better showing of your parts, had you deigned to exer- 
cise a little of that kind-heartedness which you so pointedly 
disclaimed. Malice, my General, malice is a potent stultifier. 

It is not for me to boast, and I certainly have nothing to 
boast of in this affair ; but I believe I bore your savage inso- 
lence tolerably well, considering the inflammable stuff which 
my friends tell me I am made of. But, whether I bore it like 



16 A chaplain's campaign 

a man or not, I certainly felt it as a man. And I am bold to 
say, that " if I blushed, it was to see a general want manners." 
I felt, too, more than once, a pinch of grief, that the higher 
officers of our army, soldiers and gentlemen as they are, who 
know what belongs to honour, and civility, and manhood, should 
liave such a low-minded savage consorted with them. But I 
do not remember to have been once betrayed into any loss of 
temper or of self-control. Either I was not disconcerted at all, 
or else I was too much disconcerted to be conscious of it. The 
interview, I confess, was not perfectly delightful to me ; yet I 
thought you enjoyed it rather less than I did. The worst part 
of it was, that you had a lieutenant, a short-hand writer, sit- 
ting behind the table, who kept writing all the while, evident- 
ly taking us down. I was partly amused, partly vexed, to see 
this shoulder-strapped underling, the doer of your dirty work, 
laughing at his master's wit ; but I could not help fearing, for 
I knew something of yom* tricks, lest the sequel of all this 
should be, a Butlerized version of our interview published to 
the world. I bethought me, however, that in that case my 
cue also might be, 

" A cliield's amang you taking notes, 
And, faith, he'll prent it." 

Thus much, my General, for the, to me, memorable inter- 
view which I had the honour of holding with you. Your offi- 
cial eloquence* did not lead me to expect any very gentle usage 
fi-om you, and I am bound to say that my usage was far more 
ungentle than I anticipated. For I still hoped that the 
laws of the service, which both you and I had solemnly en- 
o;ao;ed to observe, would be some shield to me. The inter- 
view ended (for all such ex'ploits of manhood must have an 
end) in your placing me in arrest, and handing me over to 
Captain Watson, commandant of your headquarters guard, 
who took me to your provost-guard prison, and put me in 
what he called a magazine tent. This was a tent nearly tilled 
with open boxes of powder and other explosive ammunition, 
or what seemed such, and among the rest a considerable heap 
of large shell, charged, as the Captain said, with Greek tire. 
There was little more than vacant room enough for me to lie 



WITH GENERAL BUTLEE. 17 

down, and that was close beside the heap of loaded shell. 
The Captain cautioned me not to allow a spark of fire in the 
tent, and especially not to disturb the shell, lest they should 
ex^Dlode and blow me up. What may have been the motive 
of this warning I cannot say, but it had the effect of the most 
studied inhumanity : I could not help being in continual ap- 
prehension lest some unlucky step of mine should set the sliell 
a-tumbling ; but I found out afterwards that they would bear 
much rougher handling than I had been led to su^^pose. 

I had never before heard of a magazine tent being set up 
in any provost-guard prison. I presume the thing had been 
hit upon by you as a novel engine of torture for certain select 
victims. It was indeed exquisitely adapted to that end, and 
was used with exquisite effect in my case. The device was 
worthy alike of your cunning and your "justice," the counsels 
of a bad heart and a busy brain being wi'itten all over it. If 
any thing but a guilty conscience can cause a man " on the 
torture of the mind to lie in restless ecstasy," then such, I 
think, must have been my condition during the two days 
spent under this part of your discipline. Yery few can im- 
agine what I underwent, and I shall not attempt to describe 
it. For some time after, as long indeed as I was held within 
the reach of your claws, I was subject to frequent turns of 
acute distress, which I called " Butler on the brain." Yet I 
had been under fire, Sir, and had found myself able to face the 
dangers of battle with tolerable composure, these being to me 
mere child's play compared to the choice hell-craft with which 
you thus made merry at my expense. To have had me ironed, 
and set to work in your Dutch Gap Canal, though, to be sure, 
it would have looked much worse, and could scarce have fail- 
ed to draw upon you an immediate storm of reprobation, 
would have distressed me nothing so much as this quiet little 
arrangement of yours for " punishing " me. Doubtless you 
perfectly understood all that. 

But I must do you the justice to say, that you soon repudi- 
ated, apparently, this child of your invention. The magazine 
tent, after I had occupied it two days, was taken down, and 
the ammunition removed entirely out of the inclosure. 
Whether Captain Watson told me what he knew to be false, 
2 



13 A chaplain's campaign 

or wlietlicr he was liimself deceived, I could not tell ; but, 
from tlie way the men tossed and banged the shell about in 
the process of removal, it appeared that the Greek fire, if there 
■was any in them, had gone too fast asleep to be waked up by 
any ordinary disturbance. Whether the open boxes of pow- 
der and other explosive ammunition were also bogus prepara- 
tions for working out your schemes of torture, I had no means 
of ascertaining. I was, and I am, very glad, Sir, that you did 
not keep me any longer in that tent. Yet I am far from sus- 
pecting you of any humanity or kindness of heart, in ordering 
the change. You probably learned that this chosen engine of 
"justice" was using me up faster than suited your purpose. 
To have kept me strained up much longer to such a pitch of 
what may be called nervous ecstasy, would have marked you 
out too plainly as a deliberate homicide. 

Wlien I remonstrated with Captain Watson against being 
confined in such a place of torment, he replied that such was 
your order ; that is, you ordered him to put me in a tent by 
myself, and that was the only tent where he could so put me. 
An average nose will readily smell out the meaning of this. 
For, of course, such astute tormentors and inquisitors as you, 
do not commonly perpetrate their crimes and inhumanities 
without providing beforehand some plausible shifts for eluding 
the responsibility of their deeds. And so, I make no doubt, 
you will say, if you have not already said, that you did not 
order me to be put in that tent, nor even know I was put 
there, l^o ! you only knew that such an engine of torture 
stood ready in your prison-pen, and that there was no other 
unoccupied tent on the ground. This was enough ; your or- 
der would send me there, as a matter of course ; yet not so 
but that you could ignore the main point, and slip out, if chal- 
lenged. For such, I have been well assured, is your habitual 
craft in managing to throw off upon your " agents and base 
second means " the scandal and blame of your practices. 
Xow, the ofiicer who, under you, had the ordering of my 
condition was none other than the lieutenant that had been 
present during our interview. He was your confidential min- 
ister, was inward with you, knew your secret mind, under- 
stood just what you wanted him to do with me, and was per- 



WITH GENERAL BUTLER. 19 

fectly sure that yoii would uphold him in what he did, how- 
ever you might make as though you did not mean it. Like 
Macbeth in suborning the murder of Banquo, you " required 
a clearness ;" and to let you stand clear was an understood part 
of his bargain with you ; your very point being, to get certain 
things done which you might openly reprove, and secretly 
reward. With such creatures at your beck, nothing was easier 
than for you to be left in blissful ignorance of whatever you 
did not choose to know ; they pleading your orders, and you 
disclaiming their particular modes of executing them. 

That such was your game in my case, appeared in that, as I 
afterwards learned, until my coming the magazine tent had 
been most carefully guarded, no jjrisoner being allowed to 
look into it, or even to go up to it ; thus showing that it had 
been set apart for a special use. Well, after all, this kind of 
moral legerdemain is but an old trick of knaves, to skulk from 
danger, or to play at hide-and-seek with their fears. If the 
wit of the thing were as great as the meanness, it might mi- 
title you to a place with Titus Oates. You take a deal of 
pains, Sir, to cover up your tracks, not observing, meanwhile, 
that you are seen covering them. I must add, that in cases 
like mine, your orders are not issued through your adjutant- 
general's office, but go direct from you to those that are to ex- 
ecute them, so that no public record is made of the proceed- 
ings. This method of course arms you, in effect, with full 
inquisitorial powers, and precludes any check or hindrance to 
the most tyrannical abuse of power. It scarce need be said, 
that in the running of this " infernal machine " you do not 
scruple to realize all the terrible oppressions of .which the 
machine is capable. 

To resume my narrative : It was nearly dark when Captain 
Watson got me housed in the prison. The weather was more 
than cool ; the ground in the tent was so wet as to be almost 
muddy ; and there I was left without a rag of a blanket to 
put under me, or over me, and with nothing to lie on but 
some barrel-staves, spread out on the ground. I had told the 
Captain that I was somewhat out of health, and rather old for 
such hardships, and had asked him to procure me a blanket or 
two, offering to pay for them. He said he would try to do so ; 



20 A chaplain's CAMPAIGN" 

I waited, but no blanket came. At last, a corporal of tlie 
guard, a very civil, kind-liearted man, named Jones, managed 
to borrow me a single blanket, which I wrapped round my 
shoulders, and spent most of the night in walking to and fro 
over the square of ground in front of my tent, not being allowed 
to walk beyond it. Even at that I shivered through hour after 
hour till near morning, when the same gentle corporal took 
me out to the cook-house, and let me sit by the stove and 
warm myself. The corporal seemed fearful lest these deeds of 
charity should come to the knowledge of his officers. 

My trunk, containing all my baggage, I had been obliged 
to leave at the landing-place, some three fourths of a mile 
from your headquarters. Before going into the prison, I had 
found means of writing a note to one Lieutenant Davenport, 
your Assistant Provost-Marshal, and the doer of your dirty 
work referred to above, describing my trunk, telling him where 
it was, and requesting him to let me have it, as I greatly need- 
ed some of the articles in it. He sent me word the trunk 
should be brought to me ; I expected it, and was disappointed. 
Had I anticipated any such proceedings, I should have gone 
first among my old comrades, and engaged some of them to 
help me through. But I then supposed you to be very diifer- 
ent from what you are. 

In the morning, a piece of boiled salt fish, a piece of bread 
rather stale, and a cup of coflee without sugar, were given 
me. The fish I could not eat, the cofffee I could not drink, 
and so made my breakfast on bread and water ; which would 
have done very well, but that, through cold and want of sleep, 
and distress of mind, my stomach was so weak and disordered 
that I could not keep the food down. At that time, I was 
not allowed to speak with any but officers of the guard ; 
and these w^ere all afraid to do any thing for me, or to let any 
thing be done ; inferring, as they well might, from the usage 
put upon me, either that I was some desperate criminal, or 
else that you had strong " personal feelings " against me. 
Otherwise, I could easily have found ways to supply my- 
self with food. Meanwhile, as I have since learned, you and 
your creatures were doing what you could to defame and 
blacken me, hinting that I was a political offender, that I had 



WITH GENERAL BUTLEE. 21 

been cauglit giving aid and comfort to the enemy, and I know 
not what other charges, all calculated to set the hearts of men 
ao-ainst me, and to shut up the instincts of kindness in those 
about me. 

The second day I applied to Captain "Watson again for some 
blankets, but was told there were none to be had. I also 
made another appeal to Lieutenant Davenport for my trunk, 
urging my needs still more earnestly, and he promised again 
that I should have it. Night came again ; my trunk was still 
kept from me ; the corporal had been obliged to return the 
borrowed blanket ; so that I was left without any thing. Ra- 
ther late in the evenmg, I managed to get an interview with 
the Captain, told him my condition, and then addressed him 
thus : " Captain Watson, I have been under the command of 
Generals Hunter, Mitchel, and Gillmore, successively, in the 
Department of the South ; while there, I served for a consid- 
erable time, voluntarily, as chaplain of the provost-guard quar- 
ters ; and I remonstrated more than once with the command- 
ing general in behalf of rebel prisoners, who were treated 
much better than I am here. And I now pledge you my 
word, sir, that if our present relations should ever be revers- 
ed, I will not treat you as you are treating me." He replied : 
" But for your cloth, sir, I should hold myself bound to chal- 
lenge you for that speech." I got no relief from him, his or- 
ders probably not allowing him to give me any ; but a fellow- 
prisoner, Captain Simpson, of a Pennsylvania battery, lent 
me a blanket and two narrow boards for the night, partly de- 
priving himself. I am grieved to learn that this humane and 
generous captain has since died. He was a brave and capable 
man, had done good service, and carried proofs of it in the 
disease that was undermining his life while I knew him. "Why 
he was thus shut up in your bull-pen I never learned ; his ex- 
periences there, no doubt, had much to do in causing his 
death. 

On the third day, as I despaired of getting my trunk fi'om 
Lieutenant Davenport, I addressed a note directly to you, tell- 
ing you how it was with me, and begging you to let me have 
my baggage, or at least some part of it, mentioning several arti- 
cles of which I was in great and pressing need. I was told 



22 A chaplain's campaign 

soon after that you had given, or would give orders to have 
my trunk brought me. A few hours later, instead of the 
trunk, came information that the trunk had disappeared, had 
probably been reshipped down the river, and should be sent 
for back by the first opportunity. All this appeared to me 
rather significant. Was I uncharitable in concluding there 
had been no serious purpose of getting my baggage to me ? I 
know not wdiether that thing of yours, Lieutenant Davenport, 
is still near you. If he be, please make my compliments to 
him : tell him, from me, that if he did not respect me nor my 
needs, he ought at least to have respected his own word ; and 
that the man who does not respect his own word must excuse 
me from respecting it. You may add, that in what I saw of 
his conduct to other prisoners, he seemed a trifle too fero- 
cious for one so young. Should he keep on at that rate, he 
will crave some thicker beverage than blood by the time he is 
as old as you and I are. He knows the whole catechism of 
profanity by heart, I should think ; and in his recitations he 
stings it home with a spitefulness worthy of your cherishing. 
As he has evidently taken you for his great man and his mod- 
el, it is hardly fair of him to hegin just like you, only more so. 
Such is, in brief, the history of my first three days with 
you. I can truly say that I would not have treated a dog of 
yours so ; no, not even if the dog had bit me. Meanwhile, 
my condition became known to some members of my own regi- 
ment, who were quartered near by. They went to work at 
once for my relief. I saw Captain Eaton, one of our very 
best ofiicers, told him of my trunk ; he promised to look after 
it, and his promise was kept. He furnished me also with a 
bunk, a bench, and some blankets, and had me supplied with 
wholesome and palatable food from his own mess, till I could 
make arrangements for feeding myself. My mattress and pil- 
low too, which I had put under our Captain Southard when 
he was brought into the camp mortally wounded, and had left 
under him when I went North, with instructions that he 
should have them as long as he might need them, — these were 
found and returned to me. And in due time two of Captain 
Eaton's men came, bringing my trunk, and saying they had 
lound it riffht where I left it, and no signs of its having been 



WITH GENERAL BUTLER. 23 

disturbed. My belief then was, and still is, that but for these 
friends I should not liave seen my trunk again very soon. 
You, Sir, did not mean I should have it, so long as any excuse 
or pretext could be found or made for keeping it from me. 
Captain Watson too, either from shame, or for some other 
cause, had another tent put up for me on dry ground. So that 
I was now pretty well supplied with what was needful for 
bodily comfort. It is well worth remarking, further, that most 
of the officers and men of the guard laid aside much of their 
roughness toward me, on learning, as they soon did, that I 
was not the wild beast which your treatment inferred me to 
be. I owe it to them to say, that they became as civil and 
kindl}'- to me as they dared to be. I^or must I omit that Chap- 
lain Jarvis, of the First Connecticut Heavy Artillery, hearing 
of the plight I was in, sought me out, and did me many kind- 
nesses, often visiting me while I was " sick and in prison," and 
bringing not only material supplies, but the far dearer com- 
forts of fraternal counsel and support. In the latter part of 
my confinement, Chaplain De Forest also, of the Eleventh 
Connecticut, was very attentive to me, and, though not nomi- 
nally of the same house with me, was just as good as if he 
had been ; a true friend and brother indeed. 

As for the seasonable relief that came from my old com- 
rades, perhaps I owe you something. Sir, for permitting it. If 
so, I thank you, yes, heartily. For it is not at all extravagant 
to say, that I should unquestionably have died in a very short 
time, at the rate you were going on with me. And the con- 
viction was certainly very strong in me at the time, nor has it 
worn out of me yet, that you meant to kill me, provided you 
could do so without seeraing to mean it. 

If such was your scheme, it was made impracticable by 
that timely intervention ; at least it could not then be put 
through with the secrecy which such schemes commonly re- 
quire. And whenever I remonstrated with your subordinates 
for their harshness to me, they still pleaded that they were but 
executing your orders, and that by doing otherwise they would 
only get themselves into trouble^ without helping me. More- 
over, you took good care to let them know that you were my 
personal enemy ; and so they understood, of course, that in 



24 A chaplain's CAMPAIGN" 

persecuting me tliey were sure of recommending themselves 
to you, however you might pretend to disown their acts. 

The event proved that your purpose respecting me was not 
substantially changed. I was held under the closest guard, 
not even being allowed to answer the calls of nature without 
an armed soldier standing over me ; whether to shield me from 
invasion, or to keep me from running away, I could not tell. 
I was also debarred fi"ee correspondence with family and 
friends, my letters being required to undergo revisal by your- 
self or your deputies. This was indeed a mean and cruel de- 
privation, and I felt it as such, having never before heard of 
its being done in case of an officer in arrest. I was told that 
any letters I might send in unsealed would either be forward- 
ed to their address or returned to me ; but I now know that 
faith was not kept with me in that. And I was shut up in 
the same narrow inclosure, known as your " bull-pen," along 
with rebel prisoners, negroes, and the offscourings of your 
army, — a most lousy, lewd, profane, and ribald set, whose 
speech was constantly teeming with stuif too bad for any civ- 
ilized hearing. Their dialect, steeped as it was in filth and 
crime, might have been pleasing to you, Sir, for it was some- 
thing like yours ; but it was not pleasing to me. Therewithal, 
I was in continual dread of catching from them the loathsome 
vermin ; in fact, it was not possible to avoid doing so. The 
thought of having my lean body thus made a pasture for 
Southern live-stock was indeed none of the pleasantest, but I 
digested it as I best could. And " the familiar beast to man " 
did not pick my old bones quite bare ; I still have a little 
flesh and some heart left, notwithstanding your mean and 
miserable oppressions. 

For it hardly need be said that this whole thing was new 
and strange to me. I had seen many officers of the army in 
arrest, but I had never before known of any being subjected 
to such hardships and indignities as these. At the close of our 
interview, I asked you to let me go in arrest among my own 
regiment, and there be confined to my quarters ; as in all my 
experience with the army had been the uniform custom in 
such cases. You refused. I made the same request again in 
my written statement to you. Still you refused. One would 



WITH GENEKAL BUTLER. 25 

think my official cliaraeter and infirm health might have won 
me that indulgence, even if it had not been customary. With- 
out asserting any peculiar claims to consideration, I may just- ^ 
ly ask why you thus excepted me from the honourable usages 
of the service ? Did you find any special motives to rough- 
ness in my gray hairs, my recent affliction, and my sacred of- 
fice ? What hindered you from granting my reasonable re- 
quest ? I^othing, evidently nothing, but the mean pleasure 
you felt in tormenting me, and in putting gratuitous and sin- 
gular indignities upon me. You had been certified of my age, 
my ill-health, my studious habits, and the late death in my 
family. What possessed you thus to trample on my infirmi- 
ties and my sorrows ? 

You, my General, were punishing me as a condemned man, 
yet I had not been tried. For, to officers, the provost-guard 
prison, even in its best form, is emphatically a place of pun- 
ishment, and is never regarded as any thing else. You had, 
and you knew it, a strong personal animosity, a sort of idiom- 
atic virulence, against me ; you said you meant to be just, 
though you scorned to be thought kind-hearted ; yet you did 
not scruple to speak as my accuser, to act as my judge in 
the very matter whereof you accused, and then to punish me 
on your own judgment. Where was your respect for even the 
commonest decencies of justice in that ? On putting me in 
arrest, you told me I was to be tried by my peers. To this I 
neither spoke nor felt any objections ; such a course would 
have been fair ; and I should have had no right to complain of 
it. For some time I hoped that so it would be. But I knew 
the law made it your duty to see that, within eight days after 
my arrest, a copy of the charges, whereon I was to be tried, 
should be served upon me. Many long, weary weeks passed, 
still no written charges appeared against me. Meanwhile, 
you kept me a close prisoner ; you victimized me with peculiar 
severities and dishonours ; you held me in a state of debase- 
ment unknown to the service : in short, as if anticipating a 
verdict of acquittal in case I should be tried, and as if deter- 
mined to make sure of your revenge at all events, you spent 
all that time in executing upon me the penalties which your 
own virulence had prompted. Such was your practical com- 



26 A chaplain's campaign 

mentary on the lawless threat uttered during our interview : 
'' I have you in my power now, sir, and I am going to punish 
you." Yet you " mean to be just !" You are indeed an ori- 
ginal man. May your imitators be few ! Up to the time of 
our interview, I had sharply resented the Southern doctrine 
respecting you. Will any one blame me if I accept it now ? 
To relieve the monotony of this review, I will here inter- 
pose a brief passage from another hand. On the 24tli of 
September, I applied to you, in writing, for leave to hold re- 
ligious services in the prison the next day; Sunday, the 25th, 
being the day on which the President had requested to have 
special thanksgivings offered in the churches for the recent 
successes of the national arms. In the course of the day, the 
application came back to me with the following indorsement : 

" Eespectfully Ketukned. — By military usage, an officer 
under arrest on charges cannot exercise any of the duties of 
his office. Such permission would be a virtual release from 
arrest. That your functions are of a high and sacred nature, 
should have made you more careful in getting under arrest for 
absence without leave ; the penalty of which is Eeduction to 
the Kanks. (Signed) " Benj. F. Butler, 

" Major-General Commanding." 

I was aware, my General, of the usage which you here en- 
forced, as I also was of other usages which you so flagrantly 
disregarded in my case ; and I made the request, not in the 
character of a chaplain, but in that of a Christian minister. 
This was obvious on the face of it. I was not so green as to 
suppose myself the chaplain of your bull-pen. I was sorry 
afterwards that I did not hold the services without asking 
your leave, and then let you punish me if you would. Anx- 
iety not to oflfend you was what caused me to do as I did. I 
confess your refusal grieved me ; I did not expect it. 

However, the thing had the effect of drawing some part of 
your fire. I now, for the first time, had authentic notice that 
I was " under arrest on charges for absence without leave." 
But I took notice of somewhat more than this : it was now 
plain that you dared not allege any other reason for the un- 
lawful course you were taking with me. And I was perfectly 



WITH GENERAL BUTLER. 27 

sure yon knew my absence witliont leave to be attended with 
snch strong mitigations, that no fair-minded court-martial 
would convict me of a punishable offence in that matter. 
What, then, was it that you here came to me with in your 
right hand ? I knew that the cause thus alleged was not the 
real cause of your proceedings, and that you would have al- 
leged the real one, if you had dared to do so. Indeed, my 
General, you overshot yourself in that " pious effusion." 
From that time forward I understood the meaning of all you 
said about having me tried. 

I was now notified, further, that the penalty in my case 
was " reduction to the ranks ;" and I understood you as 
threatening me with that penalty. In this, it strikes me that 
you prevaricated the law somewhat ; that is, you Butlerized 
it, or, which is the same thing, looked upon it asquint. The 
fourth Article of War reads thus : " Every chaplain commission- 
ed in the army or armies of the United States, who shall ab- 
sent himself from the duties assigned him, (except in cases of 
sickness or leave of absence,) shall, on conviction thereof be- 
fore a court-martial, be fined not exceeding one month's pay, 
besides the loss of his pay during his absence ; or be dis- 
charged, as the said court-martial shall judge proper." I am 
not ignorant. Sir, of the later Act of Congress, which pro- 
vides that courts-martial shall have power to sentence ofiicers 
to reduction to the ranks for absence without leave. But 
neither this Act nor any other prescribes that penalty for that 
offence. It is true, then, that reduction to the ranks may he, 
but not true that it is, the penalty in cases like mine. But 
perhaps you meant that I was obnoxious to the penalty in 
question, not by the law, but by the exercise of arbitrary 
power in breaking the law. If so, you are welcome to all the 
truth there was in your unprincipled menace. I had no fear, 
though, of your executing that threat upon me. I saw it was 
a mere piece of make-believe, and therefore did not believe it. 
Be assured. Sir, that the obliquity and indirection fetched from 
your late haunts of pot-house litigation and politics will not 
stand the fire of military life. Your old " tricks of the trade," 
however they might pass with the " boys" who were wont to 
crowd your theatre for the fun of seeing you roast witnesses 



28 A chaplain's CAMPAIGN" 

in smutty cases, are out of place in tlie army. He that would 
deceive must have at least some spice of honesty in him. 
Notwithstanding your long practice as a moral Harlequin, 
your playing of the part is too raw and clumsy for any place 
but the ring ; let alone, that you have something to learn, 
and much to unlearn, before you will be fit for any but ring- 
men to know. 

I had been in your bull-pen four or five days, when Colonel 
Serrell came to mc, and said he had been having a long talk 
with you about me. That you disclaimed all hard feelings 
towards me ; had no wish to injure me ; desired to save me 
from a court-martial. That you thought I had better write 
out for you a statement of my case, covering the main points 
which had come up in our interview ; as this might open the 
way for a settlement without a trial. That if a trial were 
had, it would be mainly with 4 view to bring out what I knew 
about General Gillmore ; and you advised me, in that case, to 
plead guilty to all the charges and specifications, as I would 
fare better by doing so than by attempting any defence. 
That, as for my absence without leave, you did not consider 
this, in the circumstances, any great ofience ; while the fact 
of my having been all along a known and allowed correspond- 
ent of the Press left you little cause against me on that score. 
I was nothing at a loss, my General, as to the meaning of all 
this. It was merely the old game of the accuser turning 
tempter. I saw th^ trap, however, too plainly to be greedy 
of the bait. 

On the other hand, the Colonel instructed me that you had 
a perfect right, without a trial, to reduce me to the ranks for 
absence without leave ; and that, in fact, there was no law to 
restrain you from doing with me any thing you might choose. 
And he appeared stuck fast in the belief — perhaps you can 
tell who stuck him there — that, to use his own phrase, you 
"had got the whip-hand of every body;" insomuch that 
neither the Lieutenant-General, nor the Secretary of AVar, 
nor even the President, dared to thwart or oppose you in any 
thing. Such was the upshot of his counsel on that head. I 
well remember how, in answer to something that was said 
touching the President and you, he spoke of " some men being 



WITH GENERAL BUTLER. 29 

made to see things tlirougli other men's eyes." Did not you 
plant some such wisdom in him, Sir ? or was it the harvest of 
his own sagacity ? Howbeit, the plain inference from all this 
was, that I stood entirely at your mercy ; that no man would 
dare to help me against you ; and that my only refuge from 
whatever punishments you might please to inflict was by 
satisfying you, and so making you my friend. The thing, I 
grant you, was not much, coming, as it did, from a star-hunt- 
ing coxcomb ; it was only a vapid, unsinewed attempt at sub- 
ornation of false testimony ! 

The Colonel therefore advised — whether from you or from 
himself I cannot say — that my best way was " to come out" 
in my Statement, " and make a clean breast of it" — those were 
his words — in regard to General Gillmore. This was indeed 
a rather pregnant hint that you were imputing to me some 
mysterious knowledge about General Gillmore, which must 
needs foul my breast with guilt ; and that here was a capital 
chance to cleanse my breast by emptying its foulness into your 
ears. I had only to make you my father-confessor, and whis- 
per myself out of your clutches by whispering another man 
in. "Wasn't it lovely ? 

I think, then, I was not far wrong in understanding the 
Colonel as conveying from you to me both an invitation and a 
threat : an invitation to damn my soul in order to gratify 
your malice against General Gillmore, which would engage 
you to stand my good friend ; a threat that, if I failed to do 
this, you would take measures for roasting that imputed know- 
ledge out of me. I assured the Colonel that you were im- 
puting to me some knowledge about General Gillmore which 
I really did not possess ; that I knew nothing whatever which 
would answer the purpose of criminating that gentleman ; 
and that I did not see how I could possibly make^any state- 
ment that would satisfy you, as you evidently wanted some- 
thing from me which I had not to give. " Do you mean, 
Colonel," said I, "that. General Butler wants me to lie against 
Gillmore V " O ! no," was his reply ; " he only wants you 
to tell the truth." " But, Colonel, what you say looks very 
much as though his plan were to wring out of me such truth 
as he chooses to impute to me. And so, in old times, when 



30 A chaplain's campaign 

tlie eiiffines of torture were used, it was claimed to be done in 
order to make the victims tell the truth." This touched his 
satirical v^ein, and he replied : " That, I think, Chaplain, was 
always done by zealous members of the true Church." " It 
may be so," said I ; " but then, you know, General Butler is 
a remarkably pious man." 

On the whole, it was manifest enough that you, my Gen- 
eral, had soaked the little Colonel all up. Well, he had been 
soaked up in like sort divers times before, the process of un- 
soaking and resoaking him not being a difficult one. For 
men like him are to men in your place very much what water 
is to a sponge : it is but to squeeze the sponge, and out comes 
the water, perhaps bringing away a little of the absorbent's 
dirt, perhaps leaving a little of its own dirt behind. If you 
catch the ship sinking, and him staying in it, then you may 
know he is not a rat. 

In all this business. Colonel Serrell was acting — whether 
consciously or blindly, I am not clear — as your decoy ; the 
programme being, to scare or wheedle, to bully or bribe, to 
oppress or corrupt me into " bearing false witness against my 
neighbour." And you were pretending to believe that I had 
some great secrets locked up in my breast, which, if I could 
be induced to give them up, would bring General Gillmore 
fairly under your teeth. I say, you were ])retending / for, as 
touching the matter you were in quest of, I had, in our inter- 
view, told you the truth, and you knew it ; my own word, 
General Gillmore's word, and all the likelihoods of the case 
converging to the same point. I strongly suspected your 
game at the time ; and what afterwards took place made it 
clear, that this was indeed the true hinge of your proceed- 
ings, — namely, to punish me unlawfully for absence without 
leave, unless I would, by lying and false accusing, enable you 
to reach and punish another. In the light of such a purpose, 
your actual treatment of me stood explained ; otherwise, it 
seemed inexplicable. And, as I really had no secrets of the 
kind to give up, I had little hope of my Statement's working 
any thing for my relief. For, if General Gillmore had been 
using me against you, I was not aware of it ; and I was quite 
sure that, if he had meant thus to use me, he would not have 



WITH GENERAL BUTLER. 31 

been so sliallow as to tell me of it. And as I had not know- 
ingly been nsed by bim against you, so I was resolved that, 
God helping me, I would not knowingly be used by you 
against him, otherwise than as integrity to God and to my 
own conscience would allow. 

I^evertheless, I set about writing the Statement, taking care 
to make it as conciliating to you as I could without sinning 
against the truth. I sent it to you, my General, with much 
misgiving. For, to satisfy you was out of the question, — 
God shield me, Sir, from being base enough to catch at such a 
bait as you threw out to me ! — and there remained the alter- 
native of being held in torture by you indefinitely, in the 
hope of extorting something further from me. I knew — for 
indeed you made no secret of it — that you had two revenges, 
a greater and a less : I suspected that I was to be the victim 
of the one or the other ; that if I could not be made an in- 
strument of the greater, I was to be used as aliment of the 
less ; so that, in either case, my flesh, " if it would feed noth- 
ing else, would feed your revenge." As for General Gillmore, 
I now had it in full assurance, that, " if you could catch him 
once upon the hip, you would feed fat the ancient grudge you 
bore him," for declining to father your military blunders, or 
to let you shift oif upon him the blame and disgrace of them. 
And so, in this snug arrangement of yours, any one with half 
an eye might see that Gillmore was to be your real game, I 
your candle for hunting it ; and that, whether the game were 
caught or not, the candle was sure to be burned. 

In the mean time, my absence without leave was to be 
worked by you merely . as a pretence to cover the deeper 
scheme in question. Was it not so, my General ? You know 
it was. Sir, and you need not attempt to deny it. In our in- 
terview, you told me once tliat I lied : perhaps you thought 
so. Did you suppose that if I had lied to oflfend you, I would 
much more lie to propitiate you ? Nay, Sir ; if I ever hire 
myself to that branch of the devil's service, it will be under 
a better tactician than you. You quack it for Satan too clum- 
sily, you mechanize falsehood and prevarication much too 
coarsely, for my taste. Your style of knavery is too untem- 
pered, too exultant, too immodest, to please the judicious : 



82 A chaplain's campaign 

the knave that wins me to strike hands mth him in the busi- 
ness mnst exercise his art with more of the modesty of an 
artist. If yon take this as my reason for preferring General 
Gilhnore to you, I care nut ; and, my word for it, he will care 
as little as I. This by the way. You knew of my shattered 
health, the severe illness of my wife, and my late domestic 
bereavement. Did you construe all this as a pledge and as- 
surance of an easier and quicker process in subduing me to 
your purpose ? So it would seem from the course you took 
with me. Because time and disease and sorrow had rendered 
my blood too thin to yield you much nourishment, therefore, 
a])parently, you craved to suck the more of it. As for any 
legal adjudication of my case, I now gave up all hope of it. 
The plain truth was, and is, that you dared not trust your 
cause to the judgment of a court-martial; and all your talk 
about having me tried was a mere pretext for keeping me in 
your bull-pen, and so " punishing" me without a trial. For it 
soon became evident, that military law and usage were noth- 
ing to you, save as you could make them tell against others. 
The case, I own, seemed to me rather hard ; but I knew that 
so it is apt to be in this world, " when evil men are strong." 

Before sending my Statement to you, I made a true and 
perfect copy of it, which I put into the hands of a tried and 
faithful friend, together with a note expressing my apprehen- 
sions as to the result. I also directed that, in certain contin- 
gencies, both tlie copy and the note should be sent to a par- 
ticular address in New- York, to be used by my friends there 
as they might judge best for my defence and protection. In 
due time, they were so sent and so used, though not used with 
any decisive effect, till after much bitter proof had come to 
me, that in taking such precautions I had acted well. The 
last I heard of tlie said copy, it had been left in the hands of 
the Secretary of War. As to the bearing of my Statement in 
respect of General Gillmore, are you aware what it was. Sir ? 
You tried to roast out of me a crimination of that officer. I 
gave you — what do you think. Sir ? — I gave you a vindication 
of him. Bless you, my General ! I did not mean it ; I never 
once thought of such a thing : I only meant to tell the simple 



WITH GENERAL BUTLER. 83 

trutli ; and such, as I have cause to know, was the eifect ot 
the simple truth in that case. 

My apprehensions proved but too well grounded. "Week 
after w^eek passed away, still no charges were made against 
me, and I was held there to die, inch by inch, in your bull- 
pen ; as, but for the intervention of friends in ISTew-York and 
elsewhere, I doubtless should have been held till this time, 
provided I had lived so long. Meanwhile, Colonel Serrell 
wrote me several notes, showing a lively interest in my be- 
half, inquiring whether any progress had been made in my 
case, and saying you had promised to take it up and dispose 
of it. I know not whether you were sincere in those prom- 
ises ; but I know that they were not kej^t, and that the only 
eifect of them was, to press home upon me that experience of 
hope deferred which maketh the heart sick. And I think it 
hardly worth the while to speak of sincerity when any act of 
yours is in question ; for, as you have shown yourself to me. 
there is no truth in you. Sir, nor any thing to build, a trust 
upon. Probably I did not at the time rightly divine the pur- 
pose of those friendly notes. I am now of the opinion that 
they were meant as feelers^ in order to ascertain whether I 
was yet ready to give up those wicked secrets which you im- 
puted to me. 

At this time, I remained in your old bull-pen, where the 
number of prisoners had been gradually reduced to a few, 
and those pretty decent men. But an order now came for re- 
moving us up to your new bull-pen, some six miles distant. 
In the act of removal, I was obliged, l"ame and feeble and 
faint as I was, to foot it all the way ; the officer in command 
utterly refusing to let me ride, though there was room in the 
wagon for half-a-dozen men, and alleging that his orders 
would not allow it. 

Your old bull-pen was, in all conscience, bad enough, but 
the new one proved, as I anticipated, far worse : the inclosure 
being much smaller, and crowded with men of the worst de- 
scription ; the ground, too, being so level, that it was impossi- 
ble to keep my quarters from being flooded whenever there 
was any considerable fall of rain. Therewithal, it was an un- 
cleaned stable, the beasts liaving lately been taken out, to 
3 



84 A chaplain's campaign 

make room for us men ; such a place, in fact, as, at that sea- 
son, no good farmer wouki think of keeping liis cattle in. 
True, it was within a stone's throw of jour own quartei-s ; 
and so is a man's pig-pen commonly within a stone's throw of 
liis house. It was inhuman in you. Sir, to keep any thing 
wearing the human form in that nasty hole. Vile aud stupid 
as many of them were, I pitied, with all my heart I pitied 
the poor creatures there huddled together, wading and wal- 
lowing in the mud and tilth from which they could not escape. 
Physically, most of them were in a worse plight than myself, 
though probably none of them felt it as I did, there being no 
personal malice or vindictiveness, and therefore no sense of 
it, in their case. Besides, the others were, for the most part, 
coniined only for a short tiuie, few of them staying more than 
a week ; whereas I was kept from week to week, and even 
from month to month. I remember but two or three who 
were held through the whole period of my confinement ; and 
these were young men, healthy, vigorous, and more or less 
inured to similar hardships and exposures ; all Avhich was not 
true in my case, and you. Sir, knew it was not. At lengtli, on 
the Gth of November, you being then in New- York, all the 
prisoners but myself were taken out of that loathsome inclos- 
ure, and removed to Bermuda Hundred. It was an act of 
great kindness in Colonel Smith, your Assistant Adjutant- 
General, to except me from that removal ; as the others were 
now placed in a condition still worse, some fifty being, as I 
atterwards learned, cooped up in a room not more than eight- 
een feet square. Of course, had you been at hand, either I 
should have gone with them, or they would have stayed 
with me. 

Such, my General, is the honest story of your dealings with 
me. And, however you may '' with unbashful forehead " 
braze it out, I found no small satisfaction in the assurance, 
which was not wanting, that your treatment of me, so far as 
it was known in the army, was regarded as " an outrage." 
Tor every step of your proceedings in my case was in direct 
and palpable violation of the law. The TTth Article of "War 
prescribes that, "Whenever any ofiicer shall be charged with 
a crime, he shall be arrested, and confined in his barracks, 



WITH GENERAL BUTLER. 35 

quarters, or tent." You confined me in your provost-guard 
prison, a place sucli as I have described it to be. The YOth 
Article of War declares, " No officer or soldier, who shall be 
put in arrest, shall continue in confinement more than eight 
days, or until such time as a court-martial can be assembled." 
You kept me in close prison fifty-three days. 

Thus it soon appeared that you cared nothing for the la-w- 
as contained in the Articles of War ; or rather, that your 
malice against me -was to you a higher la-w than those Articles, 
-which, be it observed, -we all have to subscribe on entering the 
service. And yet one of the first paragraphs in the Army 
Regulations declares, " Punishments shall be strictly conform- 
able to military la-w." Nevertheless, I still hoped for some 
time, (" the miserable have no other food but hope,") that you 
would respect the recent Act of Congress, which was passed . 
with a special view to cases like mine, and which made it un- 
lawful for you to keep me in arrest more than forty-eight days. 
The forty-eight days were passed, still I heard of no release. 
So, it was clear, that even the solemn enactments of the high- 
est law-making power in the land had no strength or virtue to 
rescue me from your strange unbenevolence. 

You, Sir, had no right to put me in the provost-guard prison 
at all ; no right to keep me in close confinement anywhere 
more than eight days ; no right to hold me in any sort of 
arrest more than forty-eight daj's ; the settled usage of the 
army interprets the time to forty days : that is, you had just 
as much right to shoot, or hang, or starve me to death, as to 
do what you did. Every provision of law bearing on my case 
was broken by you. And as week after week passed away, 
it became more and more evident that I had nothing to hope 
for in the shape of legal protection. For I was right well as- 
sured, that any appeal to the law, any word of remonstrance, 
any movement for legal remedy or redress, would only be con- 
strued by you as a fresh ofi'ence, and visited with a further 
severity. Such was your scheme of "justice." You, Sir, 
were simply rioting in the abuse of military power, spurning 
alike at the restraints of law, and the usages of humanity. I 
never imagined before what it is for an honest man to find 
himself stripped of all legal protection, and held in the condi- 



36 A chaplain's CAMPAIGN" 

tion of an outlaw. Indeed, Sir, no language of mine can fairly 
express how much I suffered during those long, dreary, dis- 
mal weeks spent in your bull-pen ; though far less, to be sure, 
in the way of physical discomfort, than of mental distress. 
May God defend you and yours. Sir, from ever sufiering what 
I suffered there, under your hard-hearted and unlawful inflic- 
tions ! I seemed to be left alone and helpless in the hands of 
a most unfeeling and vindictive man ; that man had discover- 
ed himself my personal enemy ; he was armed with military 
power ; he was capable of any outrage ; there was no sense of 
honour, no grace of manhood in him ; to be mean was his pride, 
to be brutal his pleasure ; he was revelling in the license of 
assumed impunity ; he allowed no law, nor any thing else, to 
stand between me and his malice. But, much as I suffered 
• from you, and bitter as is the remembrance of your inflictions, 
I shall not regret them, nay, I shall take comfort of them, 
provided your brutal savageness, as exercised on me, should 
work somethinsr towards inducino; the countrv to scour you 
out of her honourable service. 

It may be well to cite, here, an instance or two as showing 
what a "just man " you are, to make one law for yourself, and 
another for those in your power. In the course of our inter- 
view, you demanded to see General Gillmore's order sending 
me to Kew-York on special duty. On my handing it to you, 
you said it was an illegal order, and I had no right to obey it. 
I assured you that I was ignorant of that, and had never so 
much as suspected it ; whereupon you gave me to understand 
that such ignorance would have no force to save me from pun- 
ishment. This, no doubt, was what you and a certain strut- 
ting pronoun of yours meant by the charge of being " absent 
without propef authority." Some time after my release, I 
asked Captain Watson whether he was aware that he had been 
executing illegal orders on me. O yes ! he knew it perfectly, 
he said. I then told him that I had your authority for say- 
ing he had no right to obey those orders, and quoted what 
you had said in reference to General Gillmore's order to me. 
He replied that he could not help himself, and he would like to 
see the officer xmder you that should dare to question the legal- 
ity of your orders. " But," said I, " you might at least protest 



WITH GENERAL BUTLER. 37 

against executing orders which you know to be illegal." Yes, he 
could do that, he said, but it would only get him into the bull- 
pen. " "Well, suppose it should ; would you not rather go in 
there and be a man, than stay out and be something else ?" 
" Oh ! I don't want to be in there ; any thing but that !" was 
his reply. I have since learned from the worthy Captain, that 
he never had any written order in my case, and that he acted 
all the while under the verbal orders of your immediate sub- 
altern, Davenport. So ! here was another of the Articles of 
"War violated every day that I was kept in prison. But what 
boots it to speak of those Articles in connection with you ? as 
if your lawless spirit would condescend to know them, save as 
you might find your pleasure or your pride in breaking them. 
For it is notorious throughout the army, that your action re- 
spects the law as little as your speech does the truth ; which 
reminds me of what I have heard as coming from one of our 
distinguished generals, who knows you well : " IsTo man who 
respects himself will think it worth his while to contradict any 
thing that General Butler may say." But I trust, nay, I am 
sure, it is not in the heart or the head of our Government to 
sanction or even to tolerate such demoralizing practices in the 
high places of the military service. You will have to learn 
more of obedience. Sir, before you can command an army to 
any purpose but that of undisciplining it. 

Again : After I had been in the bull-pen about two weeks, 
a man was brought there, dressed as a citizen, his leg heavily 
jewelled with a ball and chain. His name was said to be 
Cazauran ; very likely you may remember him. He was by 
birth a Frenchman ; intelligent, well-spoken, well-mannered, 
and of some literary acquirement. "Withal, he showed con- 
siderable expertness as a short-hand writer ; and I learned that 
at one time he was employed at your headquarters as a sort of 
clerk and a reporter for the military courts. That for some 
cause or other, or on some pretext or other, you had snapped 
him up, and, without any form of trial, had sentenced him to 
wear the ball and chain, and to serve sixty days in the outermost 
rifle-pits of your line. That there you had kept him all that 
time, right in " the forefront of the hottest battle," the ball 
and chain still on him. That, soon after he was put there. 



38 A chaplain's campaign 

your newspaper spout at Norfolk published an editorial, en- 
deavouring to blast bim with I know not what evil reports, and 
expressing a hope that " some honest rebel " would shoot him 
to death. That he had managed to hold up his jewel so as to 
be seen by the rebels, after which they religiously abstained 
from firing anywhere near him ; while the soldiers about him 
had so much pity on him that they would make a sort of hur- 
dle with their muskets, and carry him to and fro between his 
riile-pit and his quarters. He told me that he had a family 
hving in St. Louis, and that ever since the date of your sen- 
tence he had not been allowed to write or receive an}' letter 
whatever. When I first saw him, he had just returned from 
serving out his sixty days ; he was then kept in the bull-pen 
some two weeks longer, still wearing the ball and chain ; and 
was at last sent over the lines into the enemy's territory. 
What your charges against him were, I had no means of ascer- 
taining : his principal crime was said to be, that he knew too 
much, or was suspected of knowing too much, about the large 
contraband trade which certain patriots of yours were carrying 
on across your lines down in North-Carolina. 

Now, my General, taking all the parts together, I really 
think this was one of the most inhuman things that I ever 
heard of. I did not meddle with the poor man's antecedents ; 
he may have been all that you and your creatures gave him 
out ; I know not, I care not what he had been or what he had 
done ; nothing could justify the inexpressible cruelty of your 
proceedings : the veriest fiend that ever made sport of human 
sufferings, it seems to me, must have relented at the thought 
of inflicting such protracted tortures. You could not possibly 
make out so bad a case against him, as I believe he had against 
you. I know of no justice here^ that can whip your crime as 
it deserves. 

During your absence in New-York, General Terry, as the 
ranking ofiicer under you, was left in command. Not know- 
ing how far his authority might reach, but knowing him to be 
as unlike you in humanity as in soldiership, I wrote to his 
headquarters as follows : 



WITH GENERAL BUTLEE, 39 

" Provost-Guaed Pkison, Headquarters 
Department Ya. and N. C, Nov. 8, 1804. 
" To Captain Adrian Terry, A. A. General, t&c. : 

" Captain : I have now been under arrest, and kept a close 
prisoner in the provost-guard prison, ^yVy days. My imprison- 
ment has been attended with very extraordinary circumstances 
of hardship and indignity. I am old and out of health, and 
ought not to be treated in this Avay, Soon after my arrest, I 
learned from General Butler that I was 'under arrest on 
charges for absence without leave ;' still no charges have in 
legal form been brought against me. 

" The law is very clear and positive, that in case of any 
officer thus under arrest, the arrest shall cease at the end ot 
forty-eight days. As an officer of the army, I believe I have 
the right to know, and I hereby respectfully ask to be inform- 
ed, for what reasons, and by what authority, the law is thus 
violated in my case. 

" Whatever be the answer to this question, I claim the pro- 
tection of the law, and solemnly protest against this infraction 
of it. Respectfully yours, &c., 

" H. N. Hudson, 
" Chaplain First :N'. Y. Yol. Engineers." 

After waiting two days, and getting no reply to this, I 
wrote to the same headquarters again : 

" Guard-House, General Butler's ) 
Headquarters in the Field, Nov. 10, 1SG4. j 
" To Lieutenant W. P. Shreeve, A. A. A. General, c&g. : 

" Lieutenant : On the 19th of September, I was put in ar- 
rest by General Butler, and handed over to the custody of his 
headquarters-guard. From that time till the 8th inst., I was 
kept shut up in his ' bull-pen ' along with rebel prisoners, 
negroes, and the lowest criminals of our army, their bodies 
infested with lice, their tongues with the most disgusting lewd- 
ness and proftxnity, such as, without very strong reason, no 
Christian man ought to be forced to hear. During the latter 
part of the time, the ' bull-pen ' aforesaid was too bad a place 
for any human beings to be shut up in, having lately been used 
as a stable, and the ground being covered with the refuse of 



40 A chaplain's CAMPAIGN" 

its former occiii)ants. I liave been subjected to the horrors 
and sufferings of this dreadful place, without a trial or a hear- 
ing. I am old, and sick, and afflicted, having lately been 
touched with a great sorrow, such as none but a parent can 
understand. My health is suffering seriously from the hard- 
ships and exposures thus forced upon me. 

" On the Stli inst., I was taken ont of the ' bull-pen,' and 
put into the guard-house, where I am still kept along with a 
parcel of soldiers who spend a good deal of the time in gam- 
bling, and nearly all of it in frightful cursing and swearing. I 
have no privacy at all ; and such is tlic noise about me that I 
can hardly get any sleep ; the terrible shocks and strains which 
I have lately undergone, having rendered me so weak and 
nervous, that I need quietness for that indispensable process of 
nature. 

" ISTow, I protest, solenmlv, and in the name of God, against 
this cruel and Avanton infliction of punishment upon me, who, 
I suppose, have the right, in common with other men, to be 
presumed innocent, until legally pronounced otherwise. 

'' I have now been held a close prisoner, and in the endur- 
ance of this cruel -pwm&lunent, Jifti/-tivo days ; whereas the Act 
of Congress approved July ITth, 1802, clearly and expressly 
provides, that in case of any officer thus put under arrest, the 
arrest shall terminate and cease at the end oi forty-eight days. 

" I believe it is my right, therefore, to demand, and I here- 
by respectfully do demand, to be released from arrest ; and I 
solemnly warn the military authorities in command to beware 
how they persist in thus punishing me, against the law, with- 
out a trial or a hearing, and to my great and manifest injury. 
I am willing and ready, as I have been ever since my arrest, 
to give my parole of honour to obey strictly all lawful orders, 
and to answer to any charges that are or may be made against 
me in due form and process of law. 

" I herewith enclose a document which will give you all the 
information that I have, as to the cause of my arrest and pun- 
ishment. You will see that the document should be carefully 
preserved and restored to me. 

" Respectfully yo\n's, &c., II. N. IIudsox, 

" Chaplain First N. Y. Yol. Engineers." 



WITH GENEEAL BUTLER. 41 

The " document " here referred to was your reply, already 
quoted, to my application for leave to hold religious services 
in the prison. Late in the evening of the same day, I re- 
ceived the following : 

" Headquarters Akmy of the James, ) 
Before Richmond, Va., Nov. 10, 1861. ) 
" J^ev. IT. JV. Hudson, JV. Y. Vol. Engineers : 

" Sir : The Brevet Major-General commanding desires me 
to acknowledge the reception of your letter relative to your 
release from arrest, and to inform you in reply that he has no 
power to act in the premises. He is not in command of the 
Department, nor even of the whole military force within it ; he 
is simply in temporary command of the troops in the field. 
General Butler is still in command of the Department, al- 
though temporarily absent from it, and is still General Terry's 
commanding officer. Your arrest was made by the order of 
General Butler as commanding officer of the Department ; 
and it would be manifestly improper for General Terry, or 
any one not acting as Department commander, to give any 
orders in relation to it. 

" I am directed also to say, that as soon as Major-General 
Butler returns your communication shall be laid before him. 

" I have the honour to be, sir, very respectfully, your obedi- 
ent servant, 

(Signed) " Adrian Terry, 

" Captain and A. A. General, &c." 

I found no fault with the course taken by General Terry ; 
indeed it was plain enough that he could not do more than he 
did. But I had gained this advantage, that some parts of my 
case were now brought to his knowledge ; and, as I had known 
him pretty well during nearly my whole term of service, I 
could have no doubt of his good disposition towards me. 
And I had never heard of his doing or saying any thing that 
looked like setting his " personal feelings " above the law. 

Meanwhile, my General, certain forces were brought to bear 
upon you in ]^ew-York, which proved stronger with you than 
the law. I need not tell you what those forces were. Per 
haps you found cause to suspect that the prostitution of your 



42 A chaplain's campaign 

public authority to tlie work of personal vengeance was not 
exactly what the Government wanted of you. Be that as it 
ma}^, you wrote instructions to General Terry as follows : 

" "Will General Terry, commanding Army of the James, 
give the following special order ? 

" Headquabteks Army or the James, ) 
November 8, 1864:. \" 
" Special Order No. — . 

" Chaplain Henry N. Hudson, having remained under ar- 
rest for some time, because of the impossibility of convening 
a court-martial to try him, because of movements in the field, 
is released from close arrest, and will report to his regiment 
for duty ; but will upon no pretence leave it." 

What sort of an honest man were you, Sir, when you wrote 
that ? You alleged " the impossibility of convening a court- 
martial to try " me, as your reason for having held me in ar- 
rest nearly two months. You had held me all that time, not 
only in arrest, but in close prison ; for which, as you well 
knew, the reason alleged was, in law, just no reason at all. 
But let that pass. Notwithstanding your " imj)ossibility," 
you had, during a large part of that very time, a court-mar- 
tial in session at your headquarters in the field; and, as I 
happen to know, case after case was tried by it, of persons 
whose arrest was subsequent to mine. That is, you here al- 
leged what you could not but know to be false ; but then you 
alleged it for the present satisfaction of those who, as you 
also knew, could not contradict it. Yerily, trickery must have 
become a passion with you, else you would not be caught 
botching and bungling it with tricks so flimsy and inexpert as 
these ! Again : On the twenty-fourth of Sejitember you could 
not let me hold religious services in the prison, because leave 
to do any official act would be " a virtual release from arrest." 
Now, you ordered me on official duty, and still kept me in 
arrest, though not in " close arrest." 

You sent a copy of the forecited instructions to a friend 
of mine in New-York, appending thereto a curious note, which 
I must reproduce : 



WITH GENERAL BUTLER. 43 

" November 8, 1864. 
" Stephen P. Nash, Esq. : 

" Dear Sik : Above you will find copy of order to be issued 
in the case of Chaplain Hudson. I believe that I am treating 
him differently from what I should do to another officer, be- 
cause I fear lest personal feelings should warp my judgment. 

(Signed) " Yours, Benj. F. Butler." 

I was right glad, my General, to learn that you were sensi- 
feible you had " personal feelings." I had been sensible of it 
a good while, I can tell you. Some thought this little effu- 
sion rather dark. To me it seemed clear enough. You 
meant, of course, that if you had been my personal friend, 
you would have treated me still worse ; that is, you acknow- 
ledged malice, and then alleged that very malice as your mo- 
tive to special leniency. Is it possible you could suppose that 
so shallow and shameless a pretext Avould serve ? " This is 
most fallible, the worm's an odd worm." 

General Terry's order, issued in pursuance of your instruc- 
tions, reached me on the eleventh of November. Though 
still, apparently, under some sort of arrest, nobody could tell 
what, I was now free to go among the dear good fellows of 
my own regiment, with whom I had spent nearly three years 
in the service of my country ; free, also, to write as I pleased 
to family and friends. I remained a sort of prisoner in our 
camp till the fourteenth of December, when I received an or- 
der to report in person at the headquarters of the Lieutenant- 
General ; and, on doing so, I found that the Lieutenant-General 
had just been informed of my case by some friends of his in 
"Washington. The day of my full deliverance had come at 
last. You were then off on your Fort Fisher expedition : what 
you would have done, had you been at your headquarters in 
the field, I cannot tell. Nor did I greatly concern myself as 
to what you might do on your return ; for I was now under 
the protection of a Soldier and a Gentleman, who was also 
your official superior, and who, as I well knew, had before 
rescued officers from your tyrannical and lawless proceedings. 

On the seventh of November, you promised my friends in 
New- York that you would " have me tried very soon." You 



44 A chaplain's campaign 

had no sucli purpose, Sir. And, as yon manifestly had little 
cause against me^ you encouraged them in the belief " that 
your object was, to make the testimony, which you hoped to 
elicit in my trial, bear against General Gillmore." Pshaw, 
Sir ! you knew w^ell enough that such a process would be far 
more apt to bring out matter against yourself than against 
him. But your promise was thoroughly falsified in that seven 
weeks more passed, still I heard of no charges against me, 
nor any thing done in preparation for my trial. "Where had 
you been such a spendthrift of truth. Sir, as to become thus 
bankrupt of that treasure? "When Colonel Serrell came to 
exercise upon me as your decoy, he told me that you dared 
not trust yourself to appoint the court and revise the sentence 
in my case, because you were conscious of certain infirmities 
that might sway you from the line of strict impartiality ; 
and therefore you proposed referring that matter to the Pres- 
ident or the Lieutenant-General. Of course this was said in 
order to make me believe that, from a peculiar sensitiveness of 
virtue, you would voluntarily waive your legal right in the 
premises, and invoke the action of your military superior ; 
whereas, in fact, you, as the prosecutor in my case, were ex- 
pressly restrained by law from acting in the matter, and tied 
to the very course which you so piously proposed to take. 
More than three months have passed since my arrest, and 
still, so far from invoking the action of your military superior, 
you have not even broached the subject to him. The simple 
truth is, you knew I was anxious to leave the service, and you 
had not punished me enough yet for dispraising your general- 
ship : my release from the bull-pen went quite against the 
grain with you ; to keep me still in your power, where I could 
not help myself, nor feel secure against further outbreaks of 
your vindictiveness, though not all the "justice" which you 
craved to inflict, was better than nothing ; and so your scheme 
was, to hold me there on the pretext that I was to be tried, 
and at the same time to devise pretexts for putting off the trial, 
that so you might still hold me. 

. Before quitting this part of the subject, I must relate a little 
incident as illustrating rarely well the spirit which animated 
you and your sequels, throughout this business. The second 



WITH GENERAL BUTLER. 45 

day of my confinement, while I was yet in the magazine-tent, 
I wrote a brief note in pencil to General Terry, telling him I 
was there " sick and in prison," with no one to help me or 
counsel me, and begging the favour of a few moments' inter- 
view. I sent the note, open, to the officer in charge, under 
the promise that any thing so sent should either go to the ad- 
dress, or be returned. The note did not come back, nor did I 
hear from thfe General. A few days later, when Colonel Ser. 
rell came to practise his peculiar style of Christianity upon 
me, I spoke of this note, and asked if he knew whether it had 
gone as directed. lie told me General Terry had received it ; 
that he had himself talked with the General about it, who said 
he could do nothing for me, and had no time to see me. I 
thought this was not like General Terry ; and it seemed right 
hard that, in my distress, he should thus give me the cold 
shoulder ; for I had but requested an act of charity, and this, 
too, in a form which no Christian gentleman, such as I held 
him to be, could well resist. His answer, as reported, hurt 
me much ; however, I swallowed my grief as well as I could ; 
for, notwithstanding my long experience of the Colonel, I 
dared not think him capable of playing me false in such 
matter as that. Some weeks after you let me out of the bull- 
pen, I saw General Terry, and inquired about that note. The 
thing was now explained ; he never saw the note, and knew 
nothing of it. He did, indeed, see the Colonel, who told him 
I was in arrest, but left him to suppose me in arrest merely 
according to law and the settled usage of the army in such cases ; 
and he had no knowledge of my real condition till after you 
went to New- York. Was Colonel Serrell acting as your chief 
engineer. Sir, in that business ? Howbeit, you and he may ar- 
range between you for the honour of that precious little feat of 
manhood. 

"Well, my General, the sum of the whole matter warrants, I 
think, a pretty grave charge against you. As I have already 
said, you were my accuser and my personal enemy ; I under- 
stand you as having admitted the personal enmity in your 
forecited note to my friend Mr. 'Na&h. As a lawyer, you 
could scarcely be ignorant of the great legal maxim, that " No 
man is a good judge in his own case." Yet you presumed to 



46 A chaplain's campaign 

act as niv judge ; and then, on yo\ir own judgment, without 
a trial or a hearing, you dared to punish me with very great 
severity for nearly two months ; singling me out and excepting 
me from the protection of the law, and from the honourable 
usages of the service ; subjecting me to the most degrading 
conditions and associations; utterly ignoring my military rank, 
ni}' sacred othce, my good name, my faithful service, my years, 
my ill-health, and my recent afHiction ; treating me, in fact, 
as an outlaw, and as having no rights which you were bound 
to respect. All this, I affirm, Avas done by you mainly with 
the intent to distress and wring me into " bearing false witness 
against my neighbour." Moreover, to enforce this wrong upon 
me, you took a mean advantage of the military power with 
which the Government had clothed you, thus perverting a 
solemn public trust to the ends of private malice. Such, Sir, 
is my charge. You will meet it as you can. 

But I have not done with you yet. The foregoing matter 
contains several allusions which, as they stand, are a little ob- 
scure ; so that I must add something further, to clear them up. 
Moreover, one of your motives for wishing to keep me in your 
clutches was, you knew right well that I had full and authen- 
tic knowledge of certain facts, which facts you desired by all 
means to suppress. Indeed, the hope of disabling my testi- 
mony in that matter was perhaps the main-spring of your ef- 
forts to get from me a lying accusation of General Gillmore. 
As I now have you on trial, the occasion must be used for 
bringing out those facts. 

At our interview, you tried to make me say that General 
Gillmore gave me the nuitter of mj^ letter to Mr. Godwin. 
This I could not say, because it was not true. I told you that 
General Gillmore did not give me any of that matter; that he 
know nothing of the letter, and I had no speech with him on 
the subject of it, till after it was written and mailed. I told 
you the same again iii my written Statement. I now affirm it 
to you once more. And the same, in effect, as I now know, 
had been told you twice by the General himself, in the official 
correspondence that passed between you soon after the letter 
was published. On your demanding who then did give me 



WITH GENERAL BUTLER. 47 

the matter, I told yon it ^^-as given me by Colonel Serrell and 
other officers of our regiment. I did this with reluctance, but 
you were pushing me hard, and browbeating me savagely. I 
now tell you, further, that the whole of that matter — every 
word, every particle, except my own reflections — was given me 
by the Colonel himself; though some parts of what he told 
me were more or less conlirmed by other of our officers. 

The truth of the aifair, as far as I can now recollect it, is 
just this : 

On Tuesday, the seventeenth of May, Colonel Serrell (for 
you nnist know. Sir, he had not then got de-sponged from Gen- 
eral Gillmore) gave me a long account of what had taken 
place up at the front during the three or four days preceding. 
He did this volnntarily, and, as I thought, in the expectation 
or hope that I M'ould use the matter in my newspaper corre- 
spondence ; for he had often given me matter to be used in that 
way. Several of our officers then in camp were personally 
knowing to the fact of the Colonel's giving me the matter in 
question ; and they also understood just as I did his purpose 
in doing so. On the strength of what lie thus told me, I wrote 
the letter to Mr. Godwin, which, I think, was dated the eight- 
eenth, though, possibly, a day or two later. In the morning 
of Saturday, the twenty-first, after the letter had gone, I went 
to the Corps Headquarters to call on the rebel General Walker, 
who had been wounded and captured the day before. That 
done, as General Gillmore was in his tent, I then called on 
him, and said : " General, I want to ask you one question ; if 
it is an improper one, you will know it to be so, and will treat 
it accordinglj-," He said he would hear the question. I then 
asked him, '' Did you, after capturing the enemy's line of 
works up near Drury's Bluif, send Colonel Serrell to General 
Butler, with a proposal to fortify our position there?" " Yes, 
I did," said he : " the works needed a little engineering, so as 
to face the other way." I replied, '' That is all. General ; I 
ask no more ; for I do not think it fair that I should be pump- 
ing matter out of you." This, to the best of my recollection, 
was the first speech I had with General Gillmore after he 
left Hilton Head, and the only speech I had with him till 
after the letter to Godwin was published. 



43 A chaplain's campaign 

"Wliile General Mitcliol was in the Department of the South, 
on consultation with him I wrote a private letter to ^Ir. 
Horace (iroeley, with whom I had been slightly acquainted 
several years. Mr. Greeley politely responded, requesting to 
hear from me occasiom\lly. I therefore now wrote him a let- 
ter nlso, the same in substance as that to Mr. Godwin. I 
think this was written after the foreeited talk with General 
Gillmorc ; and, if so, I may have stated that the main point of 
it had been substantially conlirmed to me by him. 

This, my General, is the whole and simple truth of that pro- 
ceedino-, as far as I now remember it. As Colonel Serrell was 
my informant, I trust you will allow that the contents of my 
letter to Mr. Godwin were '' derived from an authentic source." 
For your further delectation, I will next otier you a brief serv- 
ice of retrospect, hopinp: that you will be able to " read, mark, 
learn, and inwardly digest " it. 

At\er capturing the enemy's line of works near Drurv's Bluff, 
which, I think, was done on Saturday, the l-ith of May, Gen- 
eral Gillmorc sent Colonel Serrell to you, with verbal instruc- 
tions to lay before you a plan for shortening the line and facing 
it towards Eichmond ; because the works, having been con- 
structed for defences against us. obviously needed certain 
changes in order to make them available as defences against 
the enemy. The General also sent you at the same time, and 
by the same hand, a Avritten message to this etfect : That, in 
case the enemy should seriously threaten his left, he had not 
force enough there to occupy the whole of the captured line ; 
and that, if the extreme left were not occupied, it would be 
necessary to withdraw beyond range of that position. On re- 
ceiving the message, you gave this answer : " Say to General 
Gillmoix?, we are on the otfensive, not defensive: he need have 
no ap]>rehension about his left ;'' an answer so absurd and infat- 
uate, that 1 am at a loss how to account for it, but upon the sup- 
posal of your having been specially inspired to utter it. IIow- 
beit. the Colonel thereupon returned and reported your wis- 
dom to General Gillmorc in the hearing of several officei*s. 
I think you will hardly venture to deny that this is a fair and 
truthful statement of the matter in hand. 1 leave it to you 
to settle with the country and with yourself for the strange 



WITH GENERAL BUTLER. 49" 

and dreadful infatuation of your answer to General Gillmore's 
timely and judicious proposal. Would to God you had met 
that proposal as wisely as it was made ! 

Early in the morning of the following Monday — do yon 
not remember it, Sir ? — you found the case somewhat altered ; 
you were suddenly put on the defensive ; and I suspect it 
then became apparent even to you, though not till too late, 
how potent and how prolific was the unwisdom of your fore- 
cited answer. " Short, sharp, and decisive," as your own 
saucy smartness, was the discomfiture which then swept over 
you. For your own sake, I would fain hope tliat the events 
of that morning may have chastised some of the airish, 
braggart self-importance out of you, and reduced your insane 
conceit nearer to the level of your capacity. 

While the fight was in progress, you sent, in rapid succes- 
sion, first, two verbal orders, and then at least three written 
ones, to General Gillmore, to leave his position within the ene- 
my's line, and fall back. The first verhal order was carried by 
General Martindale ; the second, by an officer of your staff, 
whom I forbear to name. On receiving the first, General 
Gillmore went forthwith to making preparations for doing as 
you ordered. This necessarily occupied some time, for the 
enemy was pressing him in considerable force, so that he could 
not move at once without incurring serious loss. Your last 
wintten order was very peremptory, commanding him to with- 
draw immediately. By that time his dispositions were com- 
pleted, and he withdrew in good order, bringing oft' nearly all 
his wounded, and also most of his material. 

After falling back some half or three-fourths of a mile. Gen- 
eral Gillmore took up a good position, and there paused, to 
cover your retreat. There you came upon him, and called 
him to account for what he had done. lie produced your 
written orders. These of course you could not deny. But 
you alleged that he had begun his arrangements for falling 
back before he received either of those orders. lie admitted 
this, but cited your verhal orders as his reason for doing so. 
You thereupon denied those verbal orders, and proceeded to 
censure him as having acted without authority, in that he had 
anticipated your first written order, and begun his preparations 
4 



50 A CHArLAIN's CAMPAIGN 

tor moving before it readied liiiu. What ailed you, Sir, that 
you undertood to phiy the soldier in such a garb as that ? 
Were you frightened out of your wits ? or did your quickness 
of wit beguile you into an act which honest men cannot ap- 
preciate ? 

It is not always easy to catch the aims or divine the mo- 
tives of so intricate and eccentric a moralist as you. Here 
you had achieved a second blunder in ordering General Gill- 
more to fall back ; he being of the opinion, as others also 
were, that, apart from your order, there was no necessity for 
him to budge an inch. And your written orders were avow- 
edly based on information which soon after proved to be false. 
Those reported successes of the enemy — very important, if 
true — against General Ames and Colonel Howell in your 
rear, were, as you presently learned, bogus. It was then ap- 
parent to you, no doubt, that with a fair measure of pluck and 
steadfastness the position, which you had now lost, might have 
been held ; in which case the enemy would soon have been 
forced to relinquish the advantage he had gained in another 
part of the tield. Your noble courage, wdiich had oozed off 
so charmingly while the enemy was hot upon you, returned 
in full blast the moment you had none but your subordinates 
to deal with. Let me congratulate you. Sir, on having that 
great heart of yours charged with a bravery so prompt and so 
wise to temper itself in inverse proportion to the danger. 
" Why, Hal, thou knowest I am as valiant as Hercules ; but 
bcAvare instinct." Surely it must be fitting and right that 
such a hero as you should put on his bravest looks, when dan- 
ger stands at a respectful distance, as fearing to meet him. 
For the courage that rises in the face of peril, and modestly 
retires when the peril is past, — what does such a courage argue 
but a plentiful lack of wit ? And so your aim in this case ap- 
pears to have been to outface General Gillmore, with your re- 
dundant valour, into assuming, or at least sharing, the blame 
of having lost his position within the enemy's line ; as though 
your ordering him to withdraw had been but an after-thought 
suggested by what you found him already preparing to do. 
J3e that as it may. General Martindale, at the last accounts, 
was still alive, and was still man enough and soldier enough 



WITH GENERAL BUTLER. 61 

to bear witness to the truth in this matter ; thus fixing upon 
you the entire responsibility of the movement in question. 

Pcrliaps I ought to add that the line of works which Gene- 
ral Gillmore held that morning connected with the system of 
defences on Drury^s Bluff, and extended westward across the 
Hichmond and Petersburgh Railroad. Ten hours well spent 
in fortifying would have secured your foothold in that most 
important position. As it was, the evening of that day saw 
the whole army back within your line of intrenchments. The 
enemy soon gathered across your front, shut you in, and there 
held you, so that you could not get out. Within eight- 
and-forty hours, trains of cars were running over the road 
which you had so lately controlled, and have been running 
ever since. It was indeed a bad day for you, my General ; 
bad in more senses than one. For seven long months two 
armies have been labouring with all their might to retrieve 
the loss of that memorable day, and have not retrieved it yet. 

And here it may not be amiss to spend a thought or two 
upon your admirable gift of alternate inflation and collapse. 
For you were evidently blown big with presumption when you 
refused to fortify, as General Gillmore proposed ; and this sig- 
nal act of rashness was followed, as such acts are apt to be, 
by a no less signal act of timidity ; you being, in the hour of 
trial, scared into an abandonment of the position which, in 
the flush of success, you had rashly scorned to strengthen. So 
" kingdom'd Achilles in commotion rages, and batters down 
himself." I suppose you find it both convenient and pleasant 
thus to have your "valiant parts" now distended with arro- 
gance, now crushed together with impotence, inversely to the 
occasion. But I hope you will forgive us ordinary mortals, 
warm questrists of amusement as we are, if we indulge now 
and then in a quiet laugh at this your preposterous style of 
manhood. Of course your style is right. Sir — at least for you ; 
but this does not hinder it from being a little odd ; I have 
sometimes sinned so far as to think it almost comical. I com- 
mend you to the study of Monsieur Parolles. And, as a relish 
to the contemplation of that noted hero, I will here insert an 
apt soliloquy of one Captain Bessus,''^' merely premising that 

* A famous character in Beaumont and Fletcher's King and No King. 



52 A chaplain's CAMPAIGN" 

the Captain lias just been cowed into surrendering liis sword^ 
but is allowed to retain his knife ; whereupon he solaces him- 
self with these audible thoughts : " I will make better use of 
this than of my sword. A base spirit has this 'vantage of a 
brave one ; it keeps always at a stay ; nothing brings it down, 
not beating. I remember I prondsed the king, in a great au- 
dience, that I would make my backbiters eat my sword to a 
knife. How to get another sword I know not ; nor know any 
means left for me to maintain my credit, but impudence : 
therefore I will outswear him, and all his followers, that this 
is all that's left uneaten of my sword." 

As to the false information on which you claimed to be act- 
ing during the fight of the IGth of May, I know not who gave 
it, nor what business you had to be thus imposed upon by 
treacherous or incompetent messengers. I have heard, indeed, 
that you then had certain Southerners professedly serving you 
as spies and informers ; and it was thought by some that they 
stuffed you with those forged alarms for the very purpose of 
fooling you into doing just what you did. This was told 
me by a good and true man, who was at that time on duty 
at your headquarters ; but I cannot vouch for it. I would 
not wonder if it were true, though ; for, be assured, Sir, 
none are more easily gulled than they who have got intox- 
icate with a conceit of shrewdness and sagacity. As you 
specially plumed yourself on knowing your man, so you might 
well be a fit subject for the enemy's spies and informers to 
practise upon. The voracious A^anity of Ajax makes him an 
easy prey to the flatteries of Ulysses : behold him eagerly 
sucking in the poison that has been craftily qualified to his 
taste ! You, my General, love the voice of sycophants ; 
they are your chosen guides ; to beguile you of your trust, 
they have but to cram you with pleasing falsehoods ; you will 
taste no treachery in any thing that is sugared over with that 
disguise ; and so you are well paid for spurning at the reproofs 
of honest men. 

Thus much for your two main blunders in that famous ad- 
venture on Proctor's Creek ; which blunders, as described to 
me^soon after by Colonel Serrell, were the whole staple of my 
letter to Mr. Godwin ; though the matter has since been fur 



WITH GENERAL BUTLER. 53 

tlier explained and certified to me by better vouchers. I need 
not stay to comment on the Colonel's exorbitant virtue in urg- 
ing me, as he afterwards did, to " come out and make a clean 
breast of it," by Butlerizing upon another man the very tale 
which he knew to have been spun into my ears from his own 
exuberant lips. Doubtless I should have cause to be ashamed, 
or alarmed, at his daring to do so, but that brass is known to 
be a rather dull metal. As it is, I console myself with the 
reflection, that he would not have had the effrontery thus to 
tamper with me, if he had had the sense to understand me. 
True, he did it to please you. Sir ; but that only argues him 
fit to be your pimp. What if he should say some time hence, 
that he would not have tried such arts on me, but that he 
knew I was proof against them ? 

!Now, you also knew that Colonel Serrell gave me the mat- 
ter of my letter to Mr. Godwin ; for I told you so, plainly, in 
our interview, and you believed what I said : I read convic- 
tion in the lines of your face, as you heard my words. More- 
over, General Gillmore, as I have already shown, had told 
you twice in writing that he did not give me the matter of 
that letter. So that your proceedings in this case were not for 
the purpose of getting from me what you believed to be true, 
but of making me utter what you knew to be false. But I 
think your " high-erected spirit " must have had rare sport in 
thus employing Colonel Serrell as your undertaker in the busi- 
ness of inducing me to father his own gift on General Gill- 
more. A clever stroke of art, my General ! if it showed a 
good deal of knavery, it also showed some wit. Of course 
you did not tell him what I had told you, nor did I tell him ; 
for, to be frank, I rather enjoyed, as I presume you did. Ids 
maiden essays in the Butler craft. But let me assure you that 
such a gust of sharp practice is not very wise. They who 
have become fanatics in trickery seldom deceive any but 
themselves. 

From the foregoing account it appears that your deplorable 
military blundering in the affair under review was not the 
worst of it. Great as were your mistakes, considerate and 
kind-hearted men might have overlooked them, had you own- 
ed them frankly like a man, and bravely stood up to the re- 



64 A chaplain's campaign 

sponsibility of tliem. I grieve to say that the swift reverse 
which fell upon you, though it may have taught you some- 
thing in the art of war, failed to elicit any sparks of honour 
and manhood. Nay, more; whatever virtue there may have 
been in the lessons of tliat time to bring forth such fruits " in 
an honest and good heart," seems in your case to have fructi- 
iied in quite anotlier sort. To be sure, the blunders could not 
be undone, nor the loss and damage consequent thereon fore- 
closed. But here was at least a good chance for you to ac- 
quire the honour of nobly acknowledging the fault, though you 
could not retrieve it. And I think all right-minded men will 
agree that the frank acknowledgment of such a fault is some- 
thing better as regards the honour of a man, than not to have 
committed it. It is thus that truly noble spirits turn adversi- 
ties into felicities, losses into glorious gains, the very darkness 
of fortune serving to augment and illustrate their virtue. But 
it appears that you, instead of earning any such praise, were 
kindled just the reverse : either because you were so unmanned 
by the events of the day as not to know what you did, or else 
from an innate something which I refrain from wording as it 
is, you endeavoured to fasten upon him who had counselled 
you well the very consequences proceeding from your own 
fatal rejection of his counsel. O, my General, what a fall 
was that ! And you have ever since been seekiua: to revencje 
your blunders on those whose only crime was that of knowing 
and lamenting them. From your manner of dealing with me, 
one would suppose your huge miscarriage had never happened, 
if I had not gone and told of it. Did you imagine that by 
punishing me for grieving aloud over your fault you could 
really make me guilty, and yourself free ? 

As you seemed to be taken with " a strong delusion " about 
General Gillmore — such a delusion as often leads men to " be- 
lieve a lie," — I am minded to add a few words more touching 
the matter between him and you. 

I repeat, that if General Gillmore had been forging any 
plots, or working any arts against you, I knew nothing of them 
whatsoever. You accused me of being in a conspiracy with him. 
I submit that if he have the mind of a conspirator, he knows 
better than to take a man like me into an enterprise of that 



WITH GENERAL BUTLEK. 65 

sort. And I owe it to liini to say, that I had never heard liini 
speak an unkind or disrespectful word of you. But then, if 
he had had any such to speak, I was probably one of the last 
persons in the world that he would have been likely to speak 
them to. For the little intercourse I had held with him, 
though amicable enough, had nothing of the confidential in it. 
And I suspect that gentleman is not much used to " unpack- 
ing his heart with words " in denunciation of his official breth- 
ren. Be that as it may, I had all along believed you both 
to be good men and true ; and my deepest wish had been, 
that the best talents and best services of you both might be 
forthcoming in the great cause of the Nation. But I had 
lived in the world long enough to know, that good men 
sometimes misunderstand one another, and so fall at odds. 
And if it was so with you, that was not my business, nor had 
I made it my business. I was willing, in my place, to fight 
with or for either or both of you against the rebels ; but I Avas 
not willing to fight with or for either of you against the other. 
You had both, as I thought, done good service in the cause, 
and I honoured you both for it. And what right had you, my 
General, to be making war on him, even though you knew 
ever so well that he had been warring against you ? If 
you could not both walk the same road of duty together, 
then why not agree to walk apart, and let each other alone ? 
Or, if he would not do this, why not do it yourself neverthe- 
less, and so take the chance of outdoing him in the public 
service ? It really seemed to me that you were both bound, 
by every just consideration, to spend all your force in the com- 
mon work, postponing your private quarrels, if you had any, 

till the rebellion should be thrashed back to to where 

it came from. And I must say, my General, that in my poor 
judgment the little time and thought you have spent in perse- 
cuting me had far better been spent in prosecuting the great 
war of the Union. Depend upon it, such an use of your pow- 
ers would have fructified more to your credit. 

As for yourself, it is true I did not believe you to be a great 
general, nor even capable of becoming one. IsTeither do I be- 
lieve it now, your campaigning against Richmond and your 
bull-penning of me having alike failed to convince me of it. 



56 A chaplain's campaign 

But what of that ? there were other and even higher paths of 
honour open to you, in the just exercise of those administra- 
tive talents which you were supposed to possess. On the score 
of these, I had myself wished all honour to you. My thought 
and my speech had been : " General Butler is a strong man, a 
very strong man, and a glorious good fellow, in the right place. 
He has greatness enough of his own, if he would only be con- 
tented with it ; but, in aspiring to another sort of greatness, 
he will hazard the disappointing of that which is properly his, 
and at the same time fail of that to which he aspires.^' 

Such, I say, had been my thought and speech ; not very 
wise indeed, but honest and frank. And if my mind has since 
changed somewhat respecting you, it is but such a change as 
experience often superinduces upon minds far stronger and 
firmer than I can suppose mine to be. I, in common with 
many others, had accorded to you high administrative abili- 
ties. A nearer view of you, aided by the disenchantment 
which your peculiar manners and your singular perfections as 
a gentleman are so well adapted to effect, has convinced me 
that I was mistaken in this ; and that your genius, instead of 
being properly administrative, is merely of the detective -and 
machinative order. To be a chief of police, or a sort of mu- 
nicipal rat-catcher and wolf-tamer, is, I take it, about the true 
pitch and scope of your capacity ; unless you may be thought 
to have a special gift for harrying and buifeting witnesses and 
chaplains. !Not to put too .fine a point upon it, you are 
strangely wanting in the right temper of the administrative 
faculty : you have nothing of the magnanimity that belongs 
to that type of mental organization, and you abound in the 
meanness and petty vindictiveness that do not belong to it. 
The generous thought, the high principle, the large discourse, 
the understanding soul, — there is not a gleam of these about 
you. And I think a man can hardly do well in any ofiice of 
public administration, unless he have some conscience, — enough, 
at least, to enable him to recognize the workings of conscience 
in other men, and to appreciate those workings as an operative 
element in the problems with which he has to deal. Observe, 
I do not here question but men may be great fools in all 
this : I merely urge the fact that conscience is an actual 



WITH GENERAL BUTLER. 57 

force in liiiman affairs ; and that some account should be 
made of this force, if one would go smooth with the exist- 
ing order and compact of things. Nor must I omit, that 
you are evidently nothing if not circumventive, and that na- 
ture does not like to be circumvented on so large a scale ; she 
may indeed, for a while, humour the lust of stratagem and ar- 
tifice, but it is only for the sport of seeing " the engineer hoist 
with his own petar." For we shall see, in the long run, that 
truth and law are too much for you ; they will grind you up ; 
so that the not caring to do right will lose you the power of 
doing any thing. I grant you to be a man of quick, sharp, 
and ready parts ; you have a very considerable gift of practical 
adroitness, which you seem to mistake for wisdom ; your brain 
is as fertile as an old barn-yard, though its up-growth is neither 
wholesome nor sweet ; even in your best preparations we still 
find you dabbling in the dirt of vulgar smartness and clap- 
trap ; and of your whole style and expression it may be justly 

said, 

" Of courage we see little there, 
But, in its stead, a medley air' 
Of cunning and of impudence." 

I believe you manage to get more ofiicial brain-sprouts be- 
fore the public, than all the rest of our generals put together ; 
. and nearly every one of them has some jerk or snap of Butler- 
ism which is neither wise nor in good taste. These fond and 
fluent spurts appear to be the orts or old-ends of your long 
practice at blackguarding and abusing witnesses. They may 
answer as ear- ticklers for the groundlings and pitmen, before 
whom you have been used to perform ; but they are much too 
theatrical for a well-ordered stage, and none but third-rate or 
fourth-rate actors ever affect them. At all events, such issues 
are not the right style of a solid and symmetrical manhood : 
an Englishman would be apt to say they smell of the Old 
Bailey ; a sensible American might regard them as doing well 
enough for a Tombs lawyer, but not just the thing for a gen- 
eral in the field : a Jeffries, a Scroggs, or even an Alsatian 
Duke Ilildebrog, could beat you at them : I suspect we have 
several generals who could at least equal you in them, if they 
would let themselves down so low. Besides, you have been 



58 A chaplain's campaign 

performing in that kind long enough : what was at first a 
rather entertaining exhibition, has got " played out " into an 
uncomely exposure : the wit, if there be any in it, is of the 
cheapest sort, and can no longer raise a laugh, save at your 
own expense : in brief, the thing has grown stale ; you had 
better leave it off. 

Such, my General, is the best figure I can make of you. I 
hope you will recognize the likeness, though of course you can- 
not be expected to see yourself precisely as others see you. 
Taking you for all in all, you are now, I should think, the fitting 
sequel and continuation of what you w^ere when I used to hear 
a good deal about you as " the hard case of the Lowell Bar ;" 
your changes of character being only such as would naturally 
grow from having more room to spread yourself in, and less 
restraint upon your native aptitudes. Men who have con- 
versed much with you in your present full-blown efflorescence, 
may indeed fear you, may fawn upon you, may wonder at 
you ; but they cannot, they cannot respect you. 

And now a w^ord more as to the cause of your resentment 
against me. 

Last May, soon after landing with your army at Bermuda 
Hundred, you got possession of the railroad between Richmond 
and Petersburgh, and held it, I think, something over a w^eek. 
During that time, you might have taken up a position com- 
manding the road, fortified, and made sure of it beyond all 
reasonable peradventure. This was the wise thing for you to 
do ; but you preferred, apparently, to be doing something 
more noisy and brilliant. For a while, your movement was 
successful ; success, I take it, elevated you somewhat ; and in 
your elevation you saw some things that were not, and failed 
to see some things that were. "Witness, your unlucky dispatch 
to the Lieutenant-General, assuring him that you had effectu- 
ally cut off Beauregard from reinforcing Lee. For you must 
know. Sir, that giddiness is no good strengthener of the vision 
for the seeing of facts as they are • and that to see facts as 
they are is of all things the most needful in a commanding 
general. 

Now, I understood at the time, or thought I understood, the 
importance of holding that railroad. As I have already stat- 



WITH GENERAL BUTLER. 59 

ed, on tlie IGtli of May yoii lost control of the road, lost it 
beyond recovery ; and this, too, by what I could not choose 
but regard as one of the greatest and most inexcusable blun- 
ders of the whole war. Indeed, my General, it was a dread- 
ful miscarriage, and the nation has paid dearly for it since, 
both in blood and treasure ; five hundred millions of dollars 
and fifty thousand lives being, probably, but a moderate esti- 
mate of the cost thus entailed through the wrong-headed, vain- 
glorious conceit and egotism of a general who was no soldier, 
overbearing the counsels of A sober and judicious soldiership. 
I was certainly led to believe at the time, and did believe, as 
indeed I still do, that if the advice of Generals Smith and 
Gillmore had been followed, the result would have been very 
different. I deplored the miscarriage much : I thought we 
had had enough of civilian commanders in the field : I longed, 
more than I know how to express, to have our military work 
go on in the conduct of educated soldiers, instead of sworded 
lawyers. Still I knew right well that in all human affairs, 
but especially in war, the best men are liable to make mis- 
takes ; that such mistakes may draAV on very serious conse- 
quences ; and that wise men, instead of brooding past mis- 
takes, rather make it a point to remember them only that they 
may learn how to go on and do better. 

With these thoughts pressing upon me, I wrote the letter to 
Mr. Godwin, setting forth the fact and the circumstances of 
the miscarriage, as I understood them. The letter, against 
my expectations, was published. I was, and I still am, well 
assured, that the letter, though erroneous in some of the de- 
tails, was in its main points substantially true. But you, I 
suppose, were ambitious to be distinguished as a great general, 
perhaps as the greatest of all our generals. To have achieved 
the capture of Richmond, would have gone far towards mak- 
ing that distinction yours. I impute not such ambition to you 
as a fault ; on the contrary, I should regard it as a high vir- 
tue in you, provided you used none but just and honourable 
means to compass your object. But it was obvious enough 
that the recent miscarriage would operate as a material draw- 
back on your ambition of military renown, in case it should 
become generally known to the public. And, through the 



60 A chaplain's CAMPAIGN" 

letter aforesaid, I became, undesignedly, a means of making it 
thus known. 

This, my General, and nothing but this, was the true mo- 
tive, the real secret, of your unbenevolent proceedings against 
me ; you knew it was, and you knew, moreover, that I knew 
it was. Indeed you evidently wished me to understand that 
such was the case, and to suppose that my only chance of es- 
caping your clutches was by arming you with something 
wherewith to twist General Gillmore. So that I feel amply 
warranted to say, that your treatment of me was not for any 
purpose of military order and discipline, but to the end either 
of taking vengeance directly on me, or else of inducing me to 
serve as your instrument of vengeance on another. Whether 
you acted, also, with the further view of making an example 
of me as a newspaper correspondent, to the end of reducing 
other newspaper correspondents to a course of entire subservi- 
ency to yourself, that so you might have them to officiate, un- 
reservedly, as your advocates and puffers in the public ear, I 
pretend not to say. But this I know full well, that correspond- 
ents wdio did what they could to discredit major-generals un- 
der you were not put in your bull-pen. And perhaps it was 
but natural for you to presume, in respect of me, that " your 
defeat did by your own insinuation grow." Nevertheless, I 
protest that the fact of others having served as your spouts 
against General Gillmore, does not necessarily infer me to 
have been serving as his spout against you. 

What, then, my General, had you in all this business to 
bottom any decent plea of right or even expediency upon ? I 
had but given, in the form of a private letter, a fair and honest 
statement of what I had fairly and honestly learned touching 
the matter in question. But suppose I had done this avow- 
edly for publication, with my usual signature, -still it M'as at 
the worst but a military offence ; there was no breach of es- 
sential morality in it ; nothing to call for any extra-judicial 
infliction ; and therefore it ought not on any account to have 
been visited beyond the strict requirements of military law : 
whereas you did nothing but violate the law in my case, and 
this for the purpose of a severity far greater than the law 
would award. Do you think, by such ignoble and unmanly 



WITH GENERAL BUTLER. 61 

abuse of military power, to stifle the lionest convictions of men 
respecting you, or to purchase exemption from the just respon- 
sibility of your acts ? Who, what, I pray, are you. Sir, that 
you sliould take upon you, against the law, and without a 
trial, to punish men for a candid and liberal expression of 
judgment about you ? This is mere tyranny. Sir, and tyranny 
of a very bad kind ; such as, if unchecked, can hardly fail to 
quench the life of all true soldiership under you, Nor is mine 
by any means a solitary case : your military career has notori- 
ously been replete with like instances of arbitrary and unlaw- 
ful punishment. And what think you has been the effect ? to 
make the men respect you ? 'No, Sir ; not a bit of it : it has 
merely set them to execrating you, or to making fun of you, 
and venting broad jokes about you. And, as you have been 
going on, no officer worthy of his title could think his reputa- 
tion safe with you : all must feel themselves put to the alter- 
native of being at odds with you, or else of becoming your 
creatures; no way left but to be nothing at all, or be just 
what you please to have them, mere putty-heads and dough- 
faces to you ; either of which is fatal to the spirit and efficien- 
cy of an army. Therefore — I speak advisedly — therefore some 
of the very best officers in your command have withdrawn 
from the service, or have asked to be relieved, on the ground 
that they could not possibly serve under you either with benefit 
to the cause, or with credit to themselves. And what could we 
expect, under such a rule as yours, but that the angel of respect 
and confidence should give place to the demon of hatred and 
distrust ? men meeting each other with chilled looks and stag- 
gering eyes ; drawing the cloak of suspiciousness tight about 
them, and moving as though they dared not say their souls 
were their own ; hardly speaking together but in whispers, 
and constantly on the alert lest some of your prowlers and in- 
formers might be eyeing them. Such, my General, is the 
style of military order and discipline which your genius creates 
about you. And, instead of that which should accompany 
vour place, " as honour, love, obedience, troops of friends," 
you have — are you aware of it. Sir ? — - 

" Curses, not loud, but deep, mouth-honour, breath, 
Which the poor heart would fain deny, but dare not." 



62 A CHArLAIN'S CAMPAIGN 

Indeed, Sir, you greatly overween in thinking, as you seem 
to have done, tliat this war was gotten up, under Providence, 
mainly to the end of furnishing you with a world to bustle, 
and play the autocrat, and promulgate yourself, and air your 
smartness in. The people of this nation, and even we men of 
the army, have, or think we have, a higher concern, a more 
sacred duty, than to push and crouch and wrangle for the 
privilege of walking about meanly conspicuous betwixt your 
legs. And some of us, at least, liave other work to do besides 
smoking your blunders and failures out oi the public eye. 
Nor do we reckon it the dearest of honours to be trampled 
upon even by men much greater than you are. We have no 
military laurels to spare but for those who earn them by real 
and solid service to the cause ; nor do we hold the cause to be 
served, when tliey whose office it is to enforce the laws grow 
so big in their own esteem, as to take pride in breaking them. 
But you " had got the wliip-hand of every body ?" Ah ! Sir, 
that was a mistake ; you never had any such thing. AVell, 
my General, you, in the pride and insolence of unaccustomed 
power — robes which upstarts seldom know how to wear — 
have been strutting through your brief term of adventitious 
greatness, apparently not remembering those old maxims, that 
'• a haughty spirit goetli before a fall," and that " the pros- 
perity of fools shall destroy them." Did you, when your sun 
was high, dream, like the bold bad woman in the play, that 
there was no need of fear, "■ since none could call your power 
to account V' Alas ! Sir, that was the very time of all others 
when you should have given earnest lieed to the precept, 
'• Let him that thinketh he standetli take heed lest he fall.'' 

I have said that I liad not believed you capable of becom- 
ing a great general. But I never had the least objection to 
your becoming such. On the contrary, if you had soldiered 
your way to honour and distinction, I should have been right 
glad of it ; most assuredly I should. iN^o one rejoiced at your 
success more heartily than I did; no one prayed more earnest- 
ly that you might still succeed. The capture of Richmond 
by you would have made me fairly leap for joy. But I ques- 
tion whether your " gentle exercise and proof of arm«" on me 
has greatly furthered your reputation for soldiership. "When 



WITH GENERAL BUTLER. 63 

a man is liunting tigers, lie should not turn aside, no, not for 
an instant, to catch and tease a mouse. Your great campaign 
on the James in May was not successful. I confess you suc- 
ceeded better in your little campaign of Septeml)er on the 
Hudson ; this exploit being, apparently, just the height of 
your military genius. 

But, my General, permit me to assure you that in this latter 
enterprise your proceedings, though perhaps not wanting in 
smartness, were something ill-judged. For, in the first place, 
the fact of your grand miscarriage could not possibly be smoth- 
ered up from the world ; the public would have known and 
appreciated it just the same, though I had never written a 
word about it. In the second place, it was very evident that 
the legitimate effect of your course with me would be, to con- 
vince the public of the truth of what I had written about 
you, however they may have doubted it before. It was there- 
fore supremely unwise in joii to think of refuting my state- 
ments, or of reversing the public judgment, by letting loose 
your vindictiveness on me. Allow me to remind you, Sir, 
that " when valour preys on reason, it eats the sword it fights 
with." That a man of your hardness should do wrong to an- 
other, is not so strange. But I marvel that a man of your 
shrewdness should commit so great a blunder in so small a 
matter. For I am hugely mistaken, if your treatment of me 
do not prove more damaging to you, than any thing I had 
written or could write about you. Just think of it : You 
had made a fool of yourself in certain military doings ; I had 
told of your folly ; to be revenged on me for this, you then 
went and made a fool of yourself a second time. I know not 
what was the trouble with you : my theory is, that the lawyer 
prevented the soldier in you, and the straining to be a soldier 
subverted the lawyer ; so that your mind became as thwart 
and ill-conditioned as your manners. What you should have 
resented was your own blundering, not my exposure of it : 
whatsoever my act or my motive may have been, that was the 
wise and manly thing for you to do. To "kill your physician, 
and the fee bestow upon the foul disease," is not the best way, 
not absolutely the best. Suppose you had crushed my body 
into the dust ; or, worse, suppose you had crushed my spirit 



64 A chaplain's campaign 

into uttering that about General Gillmore wbicli I knew to be 
false ; wliat could this have done toward retrieving your mis- 
carriages, or undoing your blunders ? or even toward altering 
the public verdict respecting tbem ? Believe me, there were 
other and better ways of ajoproving your generalship, than by 
insulting and browbeating a defenceless chaplain. Let me tell 
you. Sir, that if you would be distinguished as a general, you 
will have to do something besides oppressing and tormenting 
so impotent and so insignificant a being as myself. Shame, 
shame on you, General Butler ! For decency's sake, "assume 
a virtue, if you have it not." 

Sincerely yours, &c., 

H. K. Hudson. 



WITH GENERAL BUTLER. 65 

POSTSCKIPT. 

In the foregoing letter I have expressed the conviction, that 
all the while you held me in your claws it was not your pur- 
pose to have me tried ; and that your talk about doing so was 
a mere pretext for keeping me in your bull-pen, and so pun- 
ishing me without a trial. This conviction has been rather 
strengthened than impaired by what has since occurred. On 
being removed from your late command, as my case was 
rather prominent among those brought against you, you then 
turned and made charges against me. I have not yet seen 
those charges, and know not what they are, though I have 
looked diligently, and as far as I could, to find a copy of them. 
It was your business to see that a copy was served on me. 
That you have not done so, is proof enough, both in law and 
in reason, that you still did not mean to give me the benefit 
of a trial. 

At the time the charges were made, I was at home on leave 
of absence by the Lieutenant-General. When my leave was 
out, which was on the 26th of January, I returned to my 
regiment, and there have remained till this day, waiting to 
hear from you. My term of service has now expired. You 
have had ample time, Sir, for carrying out any honest purpose 
of a trial ; and I am under no sort of obligation, either in 
duty or honour, to wait any longer for you. I learn, on good 
authority, that, though the charges were not made till after 
your removal, yet you dated them back several days before 
that event. Of course, this was done to hide the glaring an- 
achronism of your proceedings, — another bald and blear-eyed 
trick of yours. And it is the opinion of those most compe- 
tent to judge in the matter, that on being called to account 
for your criminal treatment of me, you thought it necessary 
to patch up something, in order to break or parry the force 
of what was charged upon you. But the thing had then 
reached a point where such stale and disreputable shifts would 
not go. It was vain to tinker at your broken cause in that 
way, but I suppose you must still be false. The power with 
which you had so long oppressed and insulted me was not 
incorporate with you ; the meanness was. 



66 A chaplain's campaign. 

In addition to your other heroisms, you are now the hero 
of Fort Fisher, — a very fitting consummation of your mili- 
tary career. I believe a good deal in the sagacity and 
wisdom of President Lincoln ; and when you were ordered 
to report at Lowell, I presume it was because he judged that 
you could serve the country better there than anywhere else. 
I have read your Lowell speech. Of course I did not fail 
to observe the freedom with which you there criticised and 
censured the military doings of the Lieutenant-General. 
Your virtue is certainly of a very eccentric habit. In that 
speech, you made no scruple of doing, in the most aggra- 
vated and most offensive form, the very thing which you 
tried to kill me for having done in the most excusable form. 
I am far from imputing to you any conscience of injustice 
in this ; for, as seen through your eyes, it is, I doubt not, 
perfectly right and just that you should thus punish to 
death an ounce of fault in another, and still expect impu- 
nity for a ton of the same fault in yourself. But, with such 
an illustrious example before me, I shall hope to be par- 
doned for remembering .the saying of a very wise man, 
that " faction is but tyranny out of office." — But you are 
now a fallen man, and so I forbear ; indeed, I would not 
have said so much, but that your mean-spirited vindictive- 
ness towards me has manifestly survived your fall. 

H. N. H. 

Camp First New- York Volunteer Engineers, ) 
Army of the James, Feb. 13, 1865. ) 



\Y^ 





A CHAPLAIN'S 



Campaign with Gen. Butler. 



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